Search Party - Unpredicting the future

Is it a comedy? Is it a mystery? No - it's a scene from Lightbox's Search Party.

It used to be so easy to figure out what type of TV show you were watching: If it had a laugh track, it was a formulaic sitcom; otherwise, it was a formulaic drama. That was it. Simple times. Happy times.

Now, rather than arriving home from work on a Wednesday safe in the knowledge you'll be watching LA Law at 8.30pm, you instead sit down at whatever time of the night you want, whenever you can get your co-habitors to simultaneously put away their social media-accessing devices, and then you have a half hour debate that involves scrolling for a large number of minutes through a plethora of choices on a plethora of streaming platforms.

Let's say you settle on Search Party, the new 10-part series of roughly half-hour episodes on Lightbox. Firstly, there's the question of how you find it at all, but then there's the question of how you sell it to your co-habitors.

The show is about a group of mostly unlikeable 20-somethings living relatively aimless and unsuccessful lives in New York City, overlaid with the story of their growing interest and investigation into the disappearance of a young woman they used to sort of know.

You might say it's a comedy, which is a bit true, or a mystery story, also a bit true, or that it's like Girls, or it's a satire, or a psychological character study - all claims with some kind of truth value. You might say, most honestly, that you actually have no idea what it is.

There are certain pleasures in the familiar, in the growth of affection towards, for example, people like Ross, Rachel and Joey, who were characters in a show that wasn't particularly funny and whose lives weren't particularly interesting, but whose stories followed a certain well-established, neurologically-satisfying trajectory that made us appreciate their attempts at humour more than we otherwise would have. We turned on Friends not because we thought it might challenge us, but because we knew that it wouldn't.

The pleasure of Search Party, which is a large part of the pleasure of the streaming platform revolution as a whole, is the fracturing of the old idea that we all want to watch basically the same thing, which was mutually reinforced by the fact we were only ever offered that thing.

We turn on Search Party and we brace ourselves for anything. There are cringe-comedy scenes of relational awkwardness, scenes of low farce, high tension, domestic violence and musical comedy. Do you laugh or do you not is an ongoing question.

Discomfort is the new comfort. Are you comfortable with that? Are your friends?

Can enough of us convince enough of us that the future belongs to the unpredictable that we never again will have to watch 10 series of essentially the same joke?