[ 14 years later, we’re all still trying to make it work.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

PARTY DOWN’S NEW SEASON SAYS HUSTLE CULTURE IS A SCAM  
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Alissa Wilkinson
March 2, 2023
Vox
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_ 14 years later, we’re all still trying to make it work. _

Party Down is back, in a brave new world. , Starz

 

Alissa Wilkinson
[[link removed]] covers film and
culture for Vox. Alissa is a member of the New York Film Critics
Circle and the National Society of Film Critics.

It’s important for the purposes of this article that you know my
age: I am on the verge of turning 40. Having been raised in that brief
interregnum between the Cold War and the war on terror, I, like many
of my peers, assumed that I would live my life in a stable economy and
relatively peaceful geopolitical context. I’d go to college, get a
job, and then enjoy a gradually increasing salary, benchmarked to a
gradually increasing cost of living. Everything would be pretty
normal.

Ha! Ha ha ha!

My adult life has been marked by national and global catastrophic
events, recessions, and the growing realization that the stability my
parents and grandparents had at my age is vanishingly rare. It’s
become distressingly clear that the gig jobs my peers and I relied on
to make rent in our mid-20s — but assumed we’d ditch, eventually
— have evolved into the _only_ jobs, not stopgaps but survival
necessities. We are old enough to be the parents of teenagers, but
we’re barely better off financially than we were when
we _were_ teenagers. And though we were sold a bill of goods about
the future belonging to the “creative class
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the truth is that the more creative we are, the worse our economic
prospects turn out to be.

This all probably explains why, upon finding out that a new season
of _Party Down_ was on the way, I felt a whole range of emotions.
Excitement, mostly. _Party Down _is one of those rare comedy gems
that capture life with knife-edged precision. The show premiered in
2009 with a simple concept: we follow a group of caterers in Los
Angeles, most of whom are just doing this gig to pay the bills while
waiting for their real creative careers (acting, writing, music,
comedy) to take off. Every episode takes place at a different party or
event that they’re catering. Shenanigans ensue.

“One of the reasons that we all sparked to the idea in the first
place is because all of us who originally started talking about it had
lived versions of that life,” John Enbom told me over Zoom. Enbom is
a _Party Down_ co-creator and writer — alongside Paul Rudd, Rob
Thomas, and Dan Etheridge — and he wrote most of the show’s new
season, which premiered on Starz in late February. Like many in LA, as
well as their characters, Enbom and his colleagues had picked up gig
work while waiting for their careers to take off. They knew this world
well.

The show ran on Starz for two seasons before being canceled by the
network in 2010, in part because stars Jane Lynch and Adam Scott had
nabbed new roles elsewhere (_Glee_ and _Parks and Recreation_,
respectively). Lizzy Caplan, Martin Starr, Ken Marino, Ryan Hansen,
and Megan Mullally rounded out the regular cast, along with guest
stars; Jennifer Coolidge even had a role for a few episodes.

[A group of partygoers and caterers stand smiling at a party.]

The gang’s all here! Sort of.

 Starz

But now it’s returned for a third season, and the characters have
aged as much as we have in the meantime. (Want to feel old? The gap
between the premieres of seasons two and three of _Party Down_ is
about the same as the gap between the release dates
of _Avatar_ and _Avatar: The Way of Water_.)

And that is why, mixed into my excitement for a new season of the pink
bow-tied gang and their capers, was a bit of ... how to describe it?
Anxiety. Dread. Some undefinable existential sadness. If _Party
Down_ was coming back with most of the same cast (save for Caplan,
who was unavailable), then chances were some of them were still
trapped in a catering gig they hated. And that felt a
little _too_ real.

I was right. While not everyone in the new season is still carrying
platters of hors d’oeuvres, most of them are. The season premiere
finds a few of them — Henry Pollard (Scott), Kyle Bradway (Hansen),
and Lydia Dunfree (Mullally) — enjoying some degree of success
beyond the gig life. Others, like Roman DeBeers (Starr), have barely
budged, bitter as ever. And others, like Constance Carmell (Lynch),
have accidentally lucked into the future of their wildest dreams.

Meanwhile, the inexorable Ron Donald (Marino), the show’s resident
Sisyphus, remains convinced success is just around the corner. “How
he deals with that situation and how he pushes himself to insane
limits and suffers and still goes on is something that I love to
write,” Enbom said, laughing.

Soon it comes clear that though time has passed, not much has changed,
or indeed ever will change for these characters. In some ways, _Party
Down _season three makes clear what the show was always about: that
hustle culture is a con, that success owes as much or more to dumb
luck as skill and hard work. “We think about _Party Down_ as being
so much about how you manage the luck that flows in and out of your
life,” Enbom said.

But while the characters haven’t changed, the world they’re in
has. Henry was just past 30 in the first two seasons; at 45, with a
divorce under his belt, his situation seems a lot more bleak. But now
he’s surrounded by younger coworkers who still harbor the hope of
building a creative career. It’s just that what that looks like
looks different. Sackson (Tyrel Jackson Williams) is a content
creator, aspiring to fame through TikTok, and he’s constantly
scouting and filming content during the catering gigs. And Lucy (Zoe
Chao) takes her work as the group’s chef absurdly seriously, turning
out creations that are basically inedible in pursuit of culinary
authenticity.

When the creative team sat down to imagine a _Party Down_ circa
2023, “a lot had changed in the world — what success looks like,
what dreams might be, what your ambitions could be,” Enbom said.
“That landscape has changed enormously and diversified all over the
place.” Thanks to social media — and to concepts of “selling
out” basically evaporating for Gen Z — “you can basically be
doing whatever you’re doing and hustling your hustle anywhere, at
any time.”

[Adam Scott and Jennifer Garner in Party Down. He is tending bar; she
is standing nearby with a drink.]

Jennifer Garner is in this season too!

 Starz

But it was clear this season presented a great opportunity to mirror
what a generation was experiencing right now. “This idea that there
is a simple arc from here to there, and if you just roll up your
sleeves and hustle and grind, you’re going to go from here to there
— that has been hugely complicated,” Enbom said, when I asked him
what he believed had changed in the world.

Yup. The new season of _Party Down_ does exactly what it needs to do
— it’s really, really funny — but it manages to do it while
reflecting how much more deranged the world has gotten even since
2009. In one episode, the group ends up inadvertently catering a gig
for youthful white nationalists. In another, it becomes clear that the
Marvel-ification of the movies has made getting an acting job much
harder. And, oh yeah, there’s also that thing that made even
catering gigs dry up. “Having the entire world shut down by a global
pandemic is a very _Party Down_ thing to happen to you,” Enbom
said.

I found, in the end, that there’s a strange comfort to watching this
new season of the show. Uncertainty swirls around me, and everyone
else, in the real world. Sometimes it feels like my friends and I,
people who are far luckier than most of the world, are still mourning
the future we _thought_ we’d have and settling into the one we
actually were given. Like the characters, we’re just having to find
our way. In a sense, the lesson of _Party Down_ is exactly what
Enbom says: that luck is going to flow in and out of our lives,
largely for reasons beyond our control. The big question in life is
what we will do with it.

_The third season of _Party Down_ premiered on Starz on February 24;
the six-episode season drops weekly on Fridays._

 

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