Sarah-Violet Bliss makes comedies about young New Yorkers who talk about themselves, then drops them into plots that ask something of them. With Charles Rogers she made Search Party: sharp, unkind, hard to stop watching, and broader the longer it runs.
Fi1m perspective
Dory Sief sees a poster for a woman she barely knew at college and decides to find her, mainly because nothing else in her life has asked anything of her. Her friends come along because it is more interesting than their jobs. That is Sarah-Violet Bliss's method in two sentences: take people who have never seen anything through, hand them a plot that would test a professional, and watch. In Search Party (2016), which she created, wrote and directed with Charles Rogers and Michael Showalter, the plot is a missing-person mystery and the people are four Brooklyn twentysomethings who would rather be at brunch.
Bliss met Rogers on the MFA programme at NYU Tisch and they have worked as a pair since. Their first feature, Fort Tilden (2014), followed two young women on a day trip to the beach, and the complaint at the time was that its characters were aggressively unlikeable and its satire too close to home. Bliss's answer was that they were never thinking about likeability, only about what was funny, and that is the right order to think in. Between the film and the series she was a staff writer on Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp (2015) and Ten Years Later (2017). Then came Search Party, five seasons of it, running to 2022.
The series is the achievement, and the achievement is the mix. Bliss has said, "We always think that, for some reason, the darker that the show is the funnier it will be," and in the first run that holds. The mystery is tightly built, the jokes land on the people telling them, and we could not see the plot coming, which is rare in a comedy about self-regard. We laughed at Dory's friends, who earn it, and then found we could not stop watching, which is the trick: Bliss and Rogers make the people we are laughing at into people we are worried for, without softening either half. Alia Shawkat's Dory is the reason it works, watchful and slightly ridiculous at once.
The weaknesses are the ones the show was always going to have. Its targets, brunch and the self-absorbed young of one borough, are easy, and it knows them a little too well. Each later season changes shape, and each is broader than the one before, so that the discipline of the first is spent by the end. A show that began by trusting a small joke ends up making large ones.
Bliss has so far made two things, and both are about the same people at slightly different ages. A film, Scorn, is in post-production and a series, The Band, is in development. It would be good to find out whether the method survives characters who are not in Brooklyn and not in their twenties. We suspect it does; the cruelty travels better than the milieu.
Biography
Sarah-Violet Bliss is an American screenwriter and director. She attended Oberlin College and New York University's MFA Film Program at the Tisch School of the Arts.
With frequent collaborator Charles Rogers, she wrote and directed the independent comedy Fort Tilden (2014), which won the Grand Jury Prize at SXSW. She co-created the dark comedy series Search Party (2016–2022) with Rogers and Michael Showalter, serving as writer, director and executive producer across its five seasons. She also wrote episodes of Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp (2015) and Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later (2017).
