Search Party TV review: warm, self aware and razor sharp – and no one gets out alive

In one moment in Search Party (available on channel4.com), the show's amateur sleuth reads from a conveniently annotated copy of Anna Karenina: "The pleasure lies not in discovering truth, but in searching for it." The book belongs to Chantal Witherbottom, a young woman who has gone missing, now pursued by Dory, a young woman who may as well have. "Would anyone care if something happened to me?" wonders Dory (a brilliantly earnest Alia Shawkat) in one of the funniest, sharpest and wickedly barbed shows around.

When their barely-remembered college friend disappears, four Brooklyn-based twenty-nothings immediately make it about themselves, taking to social media to hashtag their feelings (the missing person is already trending under #IAmChantal). In the wrong hands that joke would get thin fast, but while the characters have no self-insight, this finely detailed show absolutely knows the score. It manages to be dryly self-aware, with an impressive laugh rate, while somehow remaining forgivingly warm.

In an early moment, the camera pulls gently back from Dory and her sappy boyfriend Drew during a screeching argument on the street to reveal somebody impassively videoing the whole thing on his phone. Everybody here is watching and nobody is quite living.

That’s why Dory, wielding her iPhone like a magnifying glass, takes to detection with such zeal: she begins to find significance in everything, following clues through a hilarious trail of property companies, bizarre fetish rings and furniture store-based cults, with a rotation of shifty accomplices.

Both Sherlock on BBC and Striking Out on RTÉ could learn from both her adventures and her agency: straddling genres without losing her footing, and bringing a solution to the well-wrought mystery both shattering and satisfying. Case closed.