There is a lot made of Find company as a unique millennial show, like a brunch line where you can see other people standing in. It’s true that the HBO Max comedy – initially about finding a missing knowledge – is absolutely imbued with the iconography of privileged millennials; their world is Instagram-friendly and the characters are all in a self-sufficient relationship with New York City. But it is also a show with a unique worldview: where everything, no matter how remote, happens to you personally and all the time.
The new season of Find company, which premiered last week, starts in a different place than where the series began. Unaware of her friends, protagonist Dory Sief (Alia Shawkat) is held hostage by an obsessed fan who is locked up in his basement. Her friends, on the other hand, are honestly too busy noticing that she has gone missing. They are dealing with a rush of newfound fame after they literally got away with murder, which happened in the first season of the show. (Later seasons crowned the dropout.) The very public trial in season 3 gave Dory and her friends – her ex Drew (John Reynolds) and her best friends Elliott (John Early) and Portia (Meredith Hagner) – some fame which they have never had before, and this latest series of episodes shows how they get used to it.
For Portia and Elliott, this fame is all they have ever wanted, and they like to use it to sell themselves: the former for a role in processing their ordeal, the latter as a conservative expert. Drew, plagued by self-pity, leaves the city in an attempt to live in obscurity. Dory, on the other hand, is languishing alone. It’s a pretty good joke to pin down a protagonist’s survival on her hopelessly narcissistic friends.
Despite this season trending more in the thriller aspects of the show, Find company is still determined to be a comedy that keeps its knives out for its subjects – the confused, internet-ruined millennials who love to post. Although most of the program is about IRL actions such as going to places and talking to people, its appeal is closely related to the excitement of the message and the intoxicating effect of being able to mythologize yourself in the eyes of ‘ a growing number of followers.
But farm life is dangerous. Find companyis, among other things, a slow motion horror story about how the millennial snake eats its own tail. Fundamentally, it is a show about what happens when we believe the lies we tell about ourselves, and what happens when the same lies spread outward and make contact with an impressive audience.
In his scenes that take place in the basement of a disturbed fan, Find company is a series about what happens when other people view the lies you have told about yourself as gospel truths – about the suffocating vacuum that is left when you realize that people have long since ceased to care about what is real. At the heart of it all is Sief: poster-twist-influence-twist-monster, acquitted by the public but condemned by her own conscience. She is also held captive by the kind of parasocial relationship she first formed with her missing classmate and then encouraged others to build with. her.
It is noteworthy that Dory does not post much throughout Find company. Nevertheless, the reductive optics of social media are still the way she and her friends deal with the world: everything is a place to be seen or not to be seen; there are names to mark along with the ongoing negotiation between their careers and their ambitions.
None of this is different from the way young people have moved upward in New York City in popular culture. Sex and the city – but Find company his satire focuses on how quickly millennial life has proven that a lifestyle of consumption can be quickly consumed on its own.