“Party Down,” which aired the last episode of its first run in 2010, was a small miracle twice over. First, the show was endlessly inventive in finding new ways to reveal the truths of its characters, the entertainment-industry-adjacent-but-not-adjacent-enough members of a Los Angeles catering crew, through the different events they worked. And then, it ended perfectly, with burnout Henry (Adam Scott) making a first, tenuous step back towards the acting career he’d abandoned, encouraged by Casey (Lizzy Caplan), every bit as lost as he but unwilling to give up.
Thirteen years later, a show about the impossibility of understanding how Hollywood works returns, buoyed by suitably unpredictable trends — among them, the fervor for reboots and the emergence of this show’s low-key leading man as a major television star. But it’s lost a step. “Party Down” version 2.0 is, necessarily, a sadder affair: In order for its story to work, the characters have to be where we left them, which is not what almost any of them wanted. But it comes to feel dour, tonally unbalanced — a party one cannot wait to leave.
Let’s start with what seems the original sin of this version of “Party Down” — the absence of Casey. From “The Conners” to “And Just Like That,” a reboot missing some seemingly crucial character is nothing new, and (at least in the case of “Sex and the City” without Samantha) can generate new insight and a sense of loss. Here, Casey is unable to rejoin her old team because she’s now a major celebrity, which, first, deprives the show of its most reasonable cast member, the one who cut through even Henry’s vanities. It also, in being mentioned once and then never again, contributes to the ambient bad mood of the project. Her success is just the millionth indignity about which Henry can grumble.
He’s certainly been through it. We learn that the intriguingly unresolved ending of “Party Down” in 2010 — with Henry putting himself out there and trying to audition — was met with endless rejection. Henry is no longer even considering pursuing acting. And over the early going of these six episodes, Henry goes from guest at a Party Down team reunion to caterer once more after various misfortunes require him to pull together some cash. In one scene, he weeps over the degradation he has been through — how very far he feels from what, decades before, had been his aspirations — and though the scene ends with a sly reversal, a revelation that Henry’s kind of kidding around, the impression sticks.
Which is not, in and of itself, disqualifying by any means. The subject of failure is a rich one — it’s one the original “Party Down” toyed with like a loose tooth, and that this new series pokes at like an abscess. Indeed, the element of this show that most consistently works is Henry’s relationship with a movie producer and onetime catering client, played by Jennifer Garner. Granted, the always-on Garner playing a woman who urgently wants to be laid-back and fun seems in moments a bit too appropriately cast. But the oddity of the pairing, and especially Garner’s character’s attempts to engineer a late career revival for the never-was Henry, have an odd poignancy — a fantasy that both are living out in order to blot out the rest of their lives.
We get less complete pictures of the rest of the returning cast, save for Ken Marino’s Ron Donald, the crew captain whose desperately sunny hopefulness is once again a counterpoint to Henry’s glumness. Jane Lynch and Megan Mullally are occasional presences, while Martin Starr and Ryan Hansen, both playing colleagues of Henry’s, are a decade-plus older but otherwise unaltered, so much so that the show finds it has little to say about them. Two new cast additions, played by Tyrel Jackson Williams and Zoë Chao, aren’t given enough material to make much of an impression; the former is constantly asked to be live-streaming or recording for TikTok in a way that feels like a grasp at relevance for a show that’s otherwise reliving 2010. One senses the show trying for a parallel — this new generation of caterers has a set of ambitions all their own — but the older generation (really, Henry and Ron) remain too much at the center of things to allow them space.
Indeed, much of what plays out on this season of “Party Down” feels like restaging a play that had met great acclaim years before: The dynamics between the cast are the same, and so is Ron’s hapless optimism, as well as his ability to ruin relationships with clients. There’s even an episode in which the team caters a meeting of a far-right political organization — something they did the first time out.
Of course, back then it was a group of campus Republicans, and today it’s a group of neo-Nazis; everything has a tendency to keep getting worse. Ron goes through many of the same beats he did in round one — facing degradation, including financial problems and physical harm, as he waits for things to turn lucky. But his endless aspiration to make a better company has been rebuked, as were Henry’s tentative steps out of himself. Here’s where one misses Casey, who had the mordant ability to diagnose everyone else’s damage and the fight to make sure that her own damage didn’t define her.
Without an element like that, it’s easy for a show like “Party Down” to become a collection of small miseries, a cascade of misfortunes with no throughline but the people whom they’re befalling. And of those people, only Henry really pops this time. The first iteration of this show chronicled the painstaking journey up and out of a rut; it feels bizarre that it was revived only to show us, well, a trajectory headed “Down.”
“Party Down” will premiere on Friday, February 24 at midnight on the Starz app and on streaming and on the linear Starz channel at 9 p.m. ET/PT.
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