In their baby-pink bow ties and crumpled white shirts, the catering crew on the Starz series “Party Down” works event after wretched event across Los Angeles: dismal rich-kid sweet 16s and backstage parties for jaded superstars, awkward and unsuccessful suburban orgies, singles seminars for seniors, bland corporate retreats.
But none of these workers take their jobs too seriously — catering isn’t their real life, it doesn’t count, it’s just keeping them afloat until their dreams of becoming screenwriters, actors and comedians come true. This means that there is always time for vodka shots (so many shots!), running lines and reading scripts, agonizing over auditions, making out and popping whatever pills might be hidden in people’s bathrooms.
The series premiered in 2009, and was canceled after two seasons of abysmal ratings. But it found a cult following gradually, over the last 13 years, and returns this week with a new six-episode season. What really struck me, watching new episodes about my favorite bunch of food-service slackers, is how completely different “Party Down” feels from so much of the chef-focused TV and film that followed its initial run.
Though Season 3 does introduce a tormented, misunderstood catering chef, played by Zoë Chao, who believes that food is art and it “should change the way you think and feel,” the show doesn’t fetishize food or cooking at all.
Unlike, say, “The Bear” or “The Menu” in which a chef’s fierce intensity and ambition drive the business, “Party Down” features food workers who don’t really care about the job, and the food itself is almost entirely beside the point.
In 2009, that seemed like a good read on a microcosm of the Los Angeles catering scene, but now it feels sharper, more perceptive and possibly more honest about food service as a whole. For a generation of workers who survived the pandemic and sought more balanced, healthy lives, the inequities, demands and tedium of the industry have never been clearer.
“Party Down” is a goofy workplace sitcom, but it’s also that rare show that centers food-service workers, rather than chefs, owners or wealthy clientele. At the heart of the series is a crew of caterers and the mess of their ordinary, cringe-worthy, tangled-up lives — breakups, financial strains, humiliations.
Henry, played by Adam Scott, is an English teacher in the middle of a divorce, who has given up on acting (or has he?). Roman (Martin Starr) is devoted to “hard sci-fi” and still working on his opus, which he started writing on a roll of toilet paper while very high. Ken Marino plays their impossibly optimistic and awkward manager, Ron Donald, who is always on the verge of unraveling.
In earlier seasons, clients often romanticized the lifestyles of the young cater-waiters, and the freedom (read: insecurity) of working from gig to gig. “I could have been you,” a wealthy suburban dad tells Henry with a sigh, feeling trapped in his own cushy life. In another episode, a glam-rock star called Jackal Onassis confesses to Henry that he has “a fake life.”
“You know what I wish I could buy?” he says. “This! Being you guys. A real guy with an ordinary job.”
Henry, who notes that the star will be taken by his driver to a luxury hotel room to party with several women after the event, finds that hard to believe. But Jackal Onassis, out of his stage makeup, perfectly disguised in a white shirt and pink bow tie, loves playing bartender for the evening at his own party. He relishes being insulted by a guest, and later, even enjoys being fired.
It’s painful for Henry to see the work he already resents treated like a fun little game, but the show is particularly great at drawing out the brief, intense tensions and alliances that can form over the course of one night between workers and guests. The caterers have a bad habit of getting involved, giving a 16-year-old a pep talk when her friends don’t show up to her party, or attempting to walk a very drunk and disoriented guest home.
When the new season begins, years have passed and characters have aged, but they continue to reassure themselves, and one another, that their misery is temporary: Their real job and their real life are just around the corner.
Or are they? “Party Down” doesn’t seem to believe in the vague, Hollywood dream of “making it.” The show is more interested in the unlikely sweetness and meaning and friendship that can come from all of the time that’s not supposed to count, moment to moment, day to day, year to year, before some imagined big break.
Most of the show’s scenes take place in the liminal spaces of clients’ homes and venues — back kitchens, garages, tents, hallways and lots. The comedy unfolds as the characters cut limes and unpack plates and silverware, light the flames for chafing dishes, put the final garnishes on snacks, or pack up the van and break down the bar.
The story is here, in the prep time and side work. It’s in all of the hours usually skipped over onscreen for being too boring, too repetitive, too unremarkable, so that viewers can get right to the glitter and speed of service — the cooks in fresh whites fussing at the pass, the servers deployed like clockwork.
The beauty of “Party Down” is that it has always refused to glorify the food industry, pulling us instead into the endless, unglamorous, in-between time that adds up to, well, something. The profound comedy and tragedy of the absolutely mundane. Or at the very least, a hundred thousand limes, cut into wedges.
Henry’s love interest in the first two seasons is Casey, another caterer played by Lizzy Caplan, and she once asked him a question that still drives the show: “How do you know the difference between a dumb job that’s legitimately a dumb job, and a dumb job that gets you somewhere?”
The answer is in every episode, new and old: You don’t.
