Party Down

John Enbom, Dan Etheridge, Paul Rudd and Rob Thomas had an idea that hardly looks like one: a comedy about Los Angeles actors and writers who have not made it and are paying the rent by handing round canapés. Every episode is one party. The crew from Party Down Catering arrives in white shirts and pink bow ties, sets up, serves, and by the end something has gone wrong, usually because of them. It ran for two seasons of ten episodes from 20 March 2009, came back for six more on 24 February 2023, and it is one of the best American comedies of its period, and one of the saddest.

Adam Scott plays Henry Pollard, who was in a beer advert once, said “Are we having fun yet?” on television, and has decided that is the end of it. Scott gives him the face of a man doing sums he already knows the answer to. Ken Marino’s Ron Donald is the team leader, a recovering drinker whose five-year plan ends in a Soup ‘R Crackers franchise, and Marino is the show’s engine. Ron sweats, pleads, does the voice of a manager he once heard, and the panic on his face when a client frowns is so complete it stops being funny for a second and then becomes funnier.

Around them: Lizzy Caplan’s Casey Klein, a stand-up whose sets we never see go well; Jane Lynch’s Constance Carmell, who has been in more films than the rest of the crew put together and will tell you about each one; Ryan Hansen’s Kyle Bradway, an actor and singer who has never had a thought that did not flatter him; and Martin Starr’s Roman DeBeers, who writes what he insists is hard science fiction and despises Kyle above all. Starr can lose an argument with a shrug. The Kyle and Roman bickering is the show’s steadiest source of laughs and its most repetitive one.

Michael J. Pepin shoots the parties in the light they would actually have: a rented hall under fluorescent strips, a back garden at dusk, a hotel suite with the lamps on. Nobody is flattered. The kitchen where the crew hides looks like a kitchen, and the guests look like people who paid for the event. Leland Sexton and Kent Kincannon cut each episode so the party goes from setup to ruin without a wasted scene, and the directors, Fred Savage, Bryan Gordon, David Wain and Marino himself among them, stay out of the way and let the actors find the awkward pause.

Here is where the show got us. Sooner or later at nearly every party, a guest recognises Henry and asks him to say the line. He says it. We laughed the first time, and the second, and around the fourth we realised we were laughing at a man being asked to perform his own failure for people who had not noticed it was one, and we felt small. Ron has an equivalent, a bright, panicked speech about the future that he gives to anyone who will stand still, and it moved us more than a sitcom about waiters had any right to.

Not all of it holds. Lynch left after the first season and Megan Mullally arrived as Lydia Dunfree, a stage mother from the suburbs. Mullally is good, but the show had to work harder to be cruel to her, and a few second-season episodes go soft. Some parties are only as good as the guest star, and a couple are not very good. The 2023 return brings in Jennifer Garner as Evie, Tyrel Jackson Williams as Sackson and Zoë Chao as Lucy, and it is a proper continuation rather than a reunion, with J.K. Simmons back as the producer Leonard Stiltskin and terrifying. Caplan did not return, and Henry without Casey is a colder character than the show quite admits. The new jokes about the modern industry are also tidier than the old ones, as if written by people who had done some reading.

Against the workplace comedies of its time, the American The Office and Parks and Recreation among them, Party Down is smaller, meaner and better about what work does to people who wanted another kind. There are no mockumentary cameras and nobody winks. Start with the first season and give it three episodes. It carries a 15, mostly for language, and it is funnier with a drink in hand and someone beside you who has ever had a job they were embarrassed by.