100 Favorite Shows: #97 — Party Down
“Grab your destiny by the balls and squeeze hard.”
Today, television shows can air on gas station screens and bowling alley channels and still manage to find audiences and Emmy awards. Back in 2009, it was much more difficult, as evidenced by the abysmal ratings of Party Down. Airing on Starz for two seasons from ’09 to ’10, Party Down developed a cult following, but was never even close to touching the mainstream. The series centered around the Party Down catering company in California, headed by Ronald Donald (Ken Marino) and buoyed by Henry Pollard (Adam Scott) and Casey Klein (Lizzy Caplan), all of whom were trying to make it in Hollywood. Eventually, Scott’s departure to Parks and Recreation ended any hope for a third season (though fans still pray for a movie), but many still flock to the series today. With John Enbom, Rob Thomas, Dan Etheridge, and Paul Rudd credited as the show’s creators, it’s one of the most prominent examples of a series ahead of its time.
(Spoilers for Party Down reside in the essay you’re about to read. Though, you probably already knew that.)
There’s a lot of television comedies that you can read into. 30 Rock wasn’t just a joke machine, it was a pop culture satire. Arrested Development wasn’t just an intricate jungle gym of laughs, it was a parable of the Bush administration. The Larry Sanders Show wasn’t just a collection of characters making asses of themselves, it was cutting edge comedy that changed television forever. When it comes to Party Down, though, I’m not sure there’s anything to read into. It was just a straight up funny show that never aimed for aspirations higher than to make you laugh. And that was perfectly fine! It’s quite welcome to have a series that aimed to be funny with some fun character plotting along the way. Ultimately, Party Down is best remembered as a low-rated cult comedy with a cavalcade of talented actors that eventually came to an end when network shows came-a-knockin’.
On Party Down, there was Henry, the caterer turned actor turned caterer who has no passion for any of his jobs and kept his ambitions aimed incredibly low. (His one brief flirtation with fame came when his soundbite in a national ad, “Are we having fun yet?,” was repeated by anyone who came in contact with him, a la BoJack Horseman and the question, “What are you doing here?”)
Ron was the exact opposite. He cared so much about every decision the Party Down catering team made and stowed his ambitions incredibly high. Of course, his notions of fame were directly tied to becoming the leader of an illustrious catering company, whereas Henry’s were for pursuing the craft of acting. They provided the cynical/optimistic yin and yang for one another, which didn’t preclude the series’ writing staff from depicting Ron as an absolute boob and Henry as the down-on-his-luck “cool guy.” (Trying to relate to either character is a folly, though.) The rest of the cast was rounded out with an eclectic group as varying in their traits as the white children of The Breakfast Club were.
There was Casey, the rebellious failed comedian who had no patience for anyone she deemed to be cut from a cookie tray. (In the episode, “Steve Guttenberg’s Birthday,” Casey spots Colette (Sarah Habel), a friend of Kyle’s (Ryan Hansen), and gruffly inquires, “Who’s that little waif?”) Her flirtation-turned-relationship with Henry provides the heart of the show which was otherwise a skeleton of comedy, even if their romantic dalliances lasted as long as either of their connections with stardom did.
As for Kyle, the aforementioned self-aware doof, he wanted to be famous for the wrong reasons. A model who had always coasted on his good looks, Kyle aimed to be famous just for the sake of it, even though his talent was better saved for a poster inside of an Aeropostale store. (For all his stereotypical idiocy, Kyle still recognized how slow he could be when trying to keep up with others. In the aforementioned Guttenberg-themed episode while trying to impress Colette, he asks his co-workers for smart shit to say to her and then improperly implements the knowledge when regarding Roman’s (Martin Starr) sci-fi screenplay with, “It really made me think of Ayn Rand.” Good try, Kyle.)
Speaking of Roman, he might be the character who’d be best suited for today’s culture of filmmaking. With plenty of spec scripts in his arsenal, Roman rarely sees traction on any of them, prompting him to rail against those in Hollywood who are successful instead of him. On Party Down, Roman’s complaints and jealousy manifested in his person-to-person interactions, resulting in him labeling everyone who had made it in Hollywood as being either a hack, a sellout, an idiot, or all three. (He claims that all Hollywood execs know about is cocaine and whores, precluding them from appreciating his “genius” work of sci-fi. Let Fincher at him!)
Today, Roman would be the bitter, anonymous Reddit user, always trying to tear down the successes of other creators, even though his writing is hardly palatable and completely inaccessible to larger audiences. (The use of a “surgitube” in his screenplay is enough to make his whole career arc seem like some sort of Star Trek rip-off.) For all his man-against-the-system swagger, though, Roman could become a waif just as easily as Colette, as evidenced by “Celebrate Ricky Sargulesh,” an episode of Party Down that saw Roman nearly faint and meekly say, “I don’t feel really good” when he thought he accidentally put the wheels in motion for a mob-ordered hit.
Rounding out the group was the eccentric mentor figure, Constance (Jane Lynch), who provided advice to her colleagues that they were all better off not taking. When Constance departed the show, she was replaced with metropolitan transplant mom Lydia (Megan Mullally), who flipped the group’s dynamic. Instead of Constance putting on airs of a world-weary, reluctant sage, it was Lydia (who was new to Hollywood) who required the guidance of those on the catering team.
Sometimes, the guidance was not even that bad. When Guttenberg gave the team the day off and encouraged them to celebrate with him after he no longer needed their catering specialties, the Party Down team set out to work on their own careers in show business. Acting (and they’re not the worst actors) through Roman’s screenplay, they actually managed to give each other solid, effective feedback when they weren’t otherwise occupied with their catering duties. If only they didn’t need to work to pay their bills, they could’ve spent all their energy on making one another better and more equipped to thrive in their respective crafts.
Of course, they don’t really see their crafts as dreams, so much as they see it as what they are owed. Frequently over the course of Party Down, the catering team is introduced to seemingly banal concepts in the industry (you know, like actually revising your screenplay) and they’re forced to reconcile the idea that their dreams actually do require hard work. It’s a popular dream to have in Hollywood, after all, and it doesn’t come as easily as it might look.
Even when Guttenberg sets them out on a better path of hot tubs, re-writes, and Herbie: Fully Loaded (on DVD and Blu-Ray!), the lessons learned from his career still cast a palpable pall over the group. The odds are that not all of them are going to make it in show business and even the ones who do can flame out just as quickly as Guttenberg claims he did.
He waxes poetic about his early days in show business, telling Party Down, “[We were] just a bunch of struggling actors goofing around. Best time of my life.” Guttenberg means it sincerely, but the Party Down team can’t fathom it. They’re convinced that Police Academy and stardom must have been the pinnacle of Guttenberg’s life. Party Down is entirely reluctant to face the notion that their lives right then, catering the parties of richer, more successful people, would never get any better. How could they somehow feel nostalgia for their catering days when they hated everything about them?
That’s because Party Down never took the schmaltzy view of careers that sometimes comes with a workplace comedy. On The Office, the workers of Dunder Mifflin would often gather together to celebrate how they had become a family in their workplace. This was never the case on Party Down. Aside from Henry and Casey, the Party Down caterers were, at best, tolerant of one another and never quite friendly. There was no faux-sweetness or a forced sense of camaraderie that stemmed from the actors’ real-world affections for one another. Party Down consistently treated its characters harshly as they faced the crushing reality of impossible dreams and insufferable coworkers.
In spite of all of that, Party Down was never funnier than when the characters engaged in interplay with one another. Yes, there were big laughs (Ron having an existential crisis over the quantity of his ejaculate in “Cole Landry’s Draft Party” stands out), but the best humor was mined from the characters being themselves and interacting with one another as they’d be expected to in real life.
The dry, on-the-fly humor (a vibe that also extended to the episode’s title cards, which looked like they were made on Windows Movie Maker) always shone through on Party Down because it was a series where the catering mattered little, if at all. The front of the company got them into the parties of people like Sargulesh and Guttenberg where the real fun could start.
One of the main threads of the Sargulesh episode is the belief from the caterers that Ricky, a recently acquitted murderer, wrote a screenplay confessing to all of his crimes. It has nothing to do with a catering business, but it was intensely funny. The Party Down writers was able to Trojan Horse some ludicrous comedic set pieces under the guise of a team of caterers. In that way, they excelled with the best of the workplace comedies, even if they never mirrored those other shows’ sentimentality. Party Down never had to, though. It didn’t necessarily have the time (only twenty episodes were aired) to cultivate that sensation, but it never had an interest in doing anything except making us laugh. There’s nobility to that. There’s nobility to all work, even if it requires buttoning up a white dress shirt and strapping on a pink bow tie.
