The 78th annual Tony Awards aired on Sunday, June 8th, and Cole Escola took home the award for Best Actor in a Play for their role as Mary Todd Lincoln in the smash-hit comedy Oh, Mary! While Escola was largely favored to win, the moment still felt historic. An idea that they’d kept in the back of their mind since 2009 had gone on to become one of the most acclaimed Broadway comedies in decades.
The Tony win was just the latest in a string of successes for Escola, who’s been bringing their uniquely off-kilter energy to roles on stage and screen for over a decade, standing out in projects like At Home with Amy Sedaris and Mozart in the Jungle. One of their most memorable turns came in the fourth season of the Max comedy series Search Party, created by Sarah-Violet Bliss, Charles Rogers, and Michael Showalter, where Escola had the chance to deploy their brand of manic humor to more sinister ends. The show isn’t talked about much these days, but Escola’s arc represents Search Party at its best.
‘Search Party’s True Crime-Obsessed Millennial Satire
In Search Party’s first season, Dory (Alia Shawkat) sees a poster in her Brooklyn neighborhood declaring that an old college acquaintance of hers named Chantal Witherbottom (Clare McNulty) has gone missing. She takes it upon herself to try and track her down, bringing her boyfriend Drew (John Reynolds) and friends Elliott (John Early) and Portia (Meredith Hagner) along for the ride. The more Dory and the gang dig, the more they think they’ve stumbled into some kind of deeper conspiracy. Naturally, it turns out to be not at all what they imagined.
The series satirizes a particular kind of urban millennial lifestyle, where people confront their mid-20s with little sense of purpose or meaning in their lives, desperately looking for some way out of the rut they feel they’ve fallen into. Dory and her friends see their investigation as some kind of grand adventure, one that will reveal some kind of hidden meaning to everything and give them some direction in life, but that meaning ultimately doesn’t really exist. Life doesn’t unfold like a murder mystery; it’s just largely selfish people doing selfish things.
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One of the most fun parts of Search Party is that the story never stays in one place for too long, and the creators have no interest in returning to the status quo. Subsequent seasons find the gang accidentally killing an innocent man, trying to cover it up, and then ending up on trial for his murder. In the meantime, they become an odd kind of celebrity, giving them the adulation they crave in ways that rarely work out well for them. Case in point: Dory finds herself on the receiving end of a very unpleasant form of idol worship. Enter Cole Escola.
Escola’s Season 4 Arc
In Season 4 of Search Party, Escola plays Chip Wreck, a lonely soul who becomes obsessed with the gang’s trials, fixating on Dory in particular. In the Season 3 finale, Chip kidnaps Dory, and Season 4 picks up with her held captive in a felt-based replica of her apartment, as Chip tries to brainwash her into forgetting about her old life and becoming his best friend. He cuts her off from the rest of the group, who have all gone their separate ways after their murder trial, but they eventually realize something’s amiss and reunite to look for her.
Chip gives Escola an opportunity to show off the full range of their talents, playing a character who is a mix of goofy, pitiable, and deeply disturbed. The entirety of Search Party looks at the pitfalls of celebrity worship and the parasocial relationship that can develop between fans and their idols, but Season 4 takes that idea to absurd heights. The series had plenty of dark humor, but Chip’s storyline in Season 4 might contain its most effective mix of the two.
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Search Party goes to even greater extremes in its fifth and final season, taking a big narrative swing that doesn’t entirely pay off, but shows that the creators weren’t afraid to take some major risks. After narrowly escaping her felt prison when Chip’s Aunt Lyla (Susan Sarandon) burns down their house, Dory rebrands herself as some kind of wellness guru, developing a cult of devoted followers who see her as an enlightened being after her near-death experience. She ends up partnering with a tech billionaire named Tunnel Quinn (Jeff Goldblum) to develop a pill that can bring her brand of enlightenment to the masses, an effort that yields disastrous results for humanity.
Search Party covered a lot of ground over its five seasons, evolving from a fairly straightforward mystery spoof into a wide-ranging satire of the status- and celebrity-obsessed millennial condition. Some of its narrative choices may not have fully come together, but it was the rare comedy that was willing to end up in a very different place than it began, with each season taking on its own style while also feeling like part of a whole. For Cole Escola, it was one more step on the road from intriguing supporting player to Broadway domination.
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
