How — and Why — ‘Search Party’ Staged the Zombie Apocalypse

variety.com:

Ethan Shanfeld SPOILER ALERT: This piece contains spoilers for the series finale of “Search Party.”“Search Party” began with a simple premise: When a former college classmate goes missing, Dory Sief (Alia Shawkat) and her cohort of Brooklyn twenty-somethings embark on a mission to find her.

Five seasons later, Dory — now a spiritual guru and cult leader — hides in an underground bunker as zombies ravage the streets of New York City.While “Search Party” has never shied away from bold ideas — the HBO Max show killed off its protagonist-turned-antihero at the end of last season, only for Dory to reawaken 37 seconds later — Season 5 sunk its teeth into completely new territory: Dory escapes a psychiatric facility and teams up with billionaire tech mogul Tunnel Quinn (Jeff Goldblum) to produce “enlightenment pills,” which quickly turn the population into flesh-eating monsters.

However, despite drastic genre shifts across seasons, at its core, the show remains the same: Dory swindles her friends into putting their faith in her (this season more literally), and a search for answers reveals to be a search for self-actualization.

But how — and why — did “Search Party,” a campy show about self-obsessed millennial hipsters, kick off the zombie apocalypse? “Originally, we thought Season 4 would probably be the end of the series, so we were writing toward that.