Party Down season 3 review: New cast, same as it ever was

2009 Have a good time!Feel like lightning struck twice: An ensemble comedy that stars some of industry’s biggest hitters, was created by Veronica MarsRob Thomas is a genius, but not the Rob Thomas. He was joined by John Enbom (yes, that Paul Rudd). Starz aired the show for two seasons. It featured the tale of five budding creative types, including a bunch of waiters who work in Los Angeles catering. The show had an introductory episode.Parks and RecreationAdam Scott is a Post-Graduate.For the mean girls Lizzy Caplan, alongside pre-Silicon ValleyMartin Starr post-Veronica MarsRyan Hansen, as well as a preGleeJane Lynch (perpetual genius) and a former member The StateKen Marino

Have a good time!The show gained a loyal following but was eventually cancelled by its creators when its talent was taken over elsewhere. It was what I remember feeling like an innovative discovery in early streaming. My college roommates and I hadn’t seen any sitcom so close to our silly, referential sense of humor. This helped that Have a good time! was not too plot-driven — like the sitcom days of yore, it was mostly about the vibes and the workplace, each episode focused on a different event. Party Down’s existence was negated by the fact that we rarely saw them off work. This is the anxiety for many in the service industry: frequently degraded and often underpaid, these workers fear that their customers — their rude, insane, demanding customers — will never see them as anything more than that. Have a good time!’s ragtag group of caterers were delusional in their own sense, but never crazier than any of the people they worked for.

Starz has now renewed the series for six episodes. This is after many years of fan outreach. This has often been a reaction to Thomas’ work, as Veronica MarsAfter its first run, the show became a fan-funded film and later a Hulu revival. This seems to be the ideal time for a show of this caliber. Have a good time! to return; after all, who has been in the throes of society’s ugliest conversations or worse conditions over the past few years than food service workers? The new however Have a good time!Episodes may not like it, but they only care about the COVID. Point. The first new episode serves as a prologue to the series, set in March 2020 and full of “2020 is gonna be my year” altruisms. It would be great if they did! However, the episodes that followed were almost completely free of the pandemic.

Image: Starz

Image: Starz

Since we last saw them, Marino’s Ron is building out his Party Down catering service, with Roman (Starr) as one of few remaining employees under his tenure. Henry Scott (now a high school teacher) has gotten married to an offscreen woman and they have a few off-screen children. He’s classically miserable, both to have given up on his acting dream and also because he’s always like that. Caplan’s Casey doesn’t return for these new episodes, though she’s never far from Henry’s mind: an SNL cast member and a tabloid fixture, we’re always hearing about her on the news. Lydia (Lynch) and Constance (Megan Mullally) are back, the former newly married to a rich older man and the latter still hyperfocused on her daughter Escapade’s career. The season premiere is almost a stand-alone experience, a prologue, so to speak, as the gang reunites to celebrate Kyle (Hansen), who has just been cast as “Nitromancer” in some new big superhero slop, primed to make it big.

There is always something wrong with a Have a good time! party: embittered about his forthcoming fame, a member of Kyle’s old band Karma Rocket leaks footage of Kyle singing their song “My Struggle,” which is rife with unintentional references to the Holocaust. This would be a funny and surprising reveal, if only longtime fans didn’t remember that “My Struggle” was already a significant part of the season’s first run. Kyle’s insistence that it’s all a coincidence — that the references to being “put on a train” and “assigned a number” are about Hollywood — is funny, if not familiar. Henry is soon to follow Kyle at Party Down. The rest of the group are now working their old catering jobs like never before.

Many new episodes actually of Have a good time!The show’s first two seasons are familiar and the shows content with playing the classics a few years later. The group caters a freaky neo-conservative event in the third episode, “First Annual PI2A Symposium,” that harkens back to the first season’s “California College Conservative Union Caucus.” There’s an extended mushroom trip in the fourth episode, “KSGY-95 Prizewinner’s Luau,” that harkens back to the first season’s “Sin Say Shun Awards Afterparty.” The rampant familiarity of these new episodes is both a feature and a bug. It’s at its best. Have a good time!It spun its wheels. The joke was that these people weren’t going anywhere and they were not going to do anything. Their striving is to be laughed at. Their anxieties — not good enough, not hot enough, not competent enough to run a Soup’r Crackers — were exposed over and over again to the benefit of only their customers. The episode was dark and frustrating but also hilarious. The new episodes, however, are more focused on the monotony and too full of loosely linked plottiness. They also attempt humor at Hollywood’s current state. Things have changed, but they also haven’t; more of the same does not necessarily imply sharper commentary.

Image: Starz

Image: Starz

In part, that’s due to a handful of the new characters introduced by the show: Sackson (Tyrel Jackson Williams) and Lucy (Zoë Chao) are recent Party Down hires, the former a “content creator” and the latter a nouveau gastronomy type. Williams’ energy and unquestionable humor are infectious, Have a good time! doesn’t have all that much to say about the fact that being on TikTok is a job other than “Isn’t that crazy?” and “Aren’t the dances so stupid?” There’s a tacit acceptance that posting is, for some, labor, with little more investigation than that (including the oft-mentioned but rarely discussed fact that Roman is now a YouTuber, apparently). Lucy is similarly one-noted and watched, an artist in search for audiences who appreciate her bizarre, avant-garde food. Ron mocks Lucy for not making the most of her gross treats, and she feels dejected every time Ron tells her.

Both Williams and Chao bring a fun energy to the group and it’s good to see the show make an attempt to diversify its otherwise very white cast, but it’s clear the writers are not sure how to enmesh them with the returning cast. Have a good time! can’t decide if being a full-time content creator is a worthy job, nor can it determine how a person with integrity in food service could be a caterer (though there are plenty of TikTok-famous personal chefs doing OK in Los Angeles, according to my feed). There are many jokes. Have a good time! were less about the nature of the job itself and more the ambition that drives it, but it’s hard to see why either Sackson or Lucy have wound up with this gig they feel is beneath them.

Evie, a talented producer and hotshot who is interested in Henry’s story, is another important addition to the show. Have a good time! doesn’t want Garner to take over for Caplan, but she’s a tough fit within the cast. Garner is a game and eager performer — I’m never mad to see her show up — but an odd match with the ever-sardonic Scott. It’s hard to know where their storyline is going, having only seen the first five of six episodes, and knowing Have a good time!’s oft-sadistic tone, it’s likely nowhere good. However, her inclusion shows that the series is intently focusing on Hollywood’s cruel and casual indifference to the industry rather than its food service workers. Evie’s relationship with Henry is, regrettably enough, quite boring.

That the show skips from March 2020 to sometime in the late summer or early fall of 2021 overlooks much of the roughest parts of the pandemic for workers, only ever making note that Ron worked through it, suffering from COVID multiple times, his various side effects popping up when most comically effective (and in Marino’s hands, very much so). Have a good time!Although it was not strictly Hollywood commentary or service industry commentary. However, its return was so steeped with the inequity and unfairness of an ever-similar Hollywood that the show forgets an entire industry that has been utterly destroyed over the last few years. That the new episodes feel so similar to the old ones is not a disappointment because we look to the show for embittered catharsis, but it’s not telling us anything about a flawed industry put wholly on display for its savagery since the show first went off the air. If comedy in general “hits different” in a post-pandemic world, why lean into such familiar beats?

The new is a welcome addition to a sea of revivals and reboots. Have a good time!These episodes aren’t the worst or best. It is one of the most talented casts of all time, with many performers that haven’t lost their edge. Marino is one of the best comedic performers of his generation and a welcomed presence on the TV screen. Ron Donald is another creation that will be remembered for a long time. He could scream for hours, which is part of the reason I watched this season. These episodes will be a delight to those who missed the irreverent, absurd pitter-patter humor of the series. It was all the secret. Have a good time!Party Down and the show: Party Down was meant to fill in for the characters who were eager to get on with their lives. It feels as if these characters are stuck in a revival. They’re shiny, glossy, cheap, and miserable. Have a good time!Would be satisfied to just skewer. This is the world around. Have a good time!It isn’t their fault that it seems as dark and unforgiving today as it did 12 years ago. The definition of insaneity is repeating the same thing and hoping for something different.