The show reveals the danger of thinking too big when your own life feels small. Illustration by Jamie Coe

“Should we do something?” Dory asks her boyfriend, Drew, as screaming voices leak through their bathroom wall.

“There’s no point,” Drew says.

“Something terrible could be happening!”

“Yeah,” he says. “Something terrible is happening. Everywhere. All the time.”

“Search Party,” on TBS, is a shrewd dark comedy starring the wonderful and soft-faced Alia Shawkat as Dory, a recent college graduate turned Nancy Drew. Blending screwball fizz and sticky melancholy, it basically invents a new genre: the noir sitcom. It is also, at ten episodes, exactly the right length. Even the costumes are on the money. At times, “Search Party” reminded me of “Fleabag” and “Catastrophe,” two recent series that were only six episodes long but entirely satisfying. This year, television has produced more than its share of high-end mysteries that fizzled out (“The Night Of”); promising adventures that got hamburger-helpered into something inedible (half the Netflix and Amazon originals); and cinematic extravaganzas that fall short of their own ambitions (“Westworld,” sadly). When you’re seeking something to absorb you, as many of us are these days, there’s a lot to be said for a show that repays your trust.

“Search Party” begins with a scene right out of a crime procedural: flashlights swing through the darkness as voices cry out, “Chantal! Chantal!” Chantal Witherbottom, a young woman living in Brooklyn, has disappeared. Perhaps she was abducted. Maybe she’s dead. A missing-person poster catches the eye of Dory, a former college acquaintance of Chantal’s, who has so little going on in her life that she becomes obsessed with the mystery, and grows convinced that Chantal is alive and in danger. Immediately, Dory does my favorite thing for a character in any genre of fiction: she turns into an amateur detective. Once she begins filling her time with private-eye activities—spying on strangers, digging through documents, constructing conspiracy boards with red string—she discovers that she loves it. As she runs down a filthy alley, from darkness to light, she breaks into a joyful grin: she’s clearly happier than she’s ever been.

Dory finds plenty of suspects, from Chantal’s twitchy ex-boyfriend to the sleazy upskirt-photo-taking dad for whom Chantal was once a nanny. The potential conspiracy includes a cultish art store; there’s a powerful real-estate company, too—and Chantal’s own family has enough suspicious figures that a friend of Dory’s spends a vigil in Chappaqua looking at relatives and snarking, “He did it!” Dory, once a doormat, gets bossy, dragging her old college gang into her project, including Drew (a goofy John Reynolds) and their two shallow brunch buddies, the wannabe designer Elliott (a hilariously haughty John Early) and the actress Portia (Meredith Hagner, finding pathos and wit in someone who could easily be a ditzy cartoon). She also joins forces with an actual detective, who is played with stubbly ambiguity and genuine heat by Ron Livingston.

There are twists and turns, but things never get confusing. Each episode ends with a small revelation that keeps Dory moving. Even minor characters get full arcs and smart backstories. An assortment of wittily filmed group scenes function as social satire of New York culture among recent college graduates eager to convince one another that they’ve made it as adults. There’s a Brooklyn rooftop party, full of self-promoters; a dinner party gone awry; a New Age ritual gone awry; a charity benefit gone awry. The creators, Sarah-Violet Bliss, Charles Rogers, and Michael Showalter, have an eye for pointed social details, like a scene of Chantal’s college a-cappella group, who perform a downbeat version of “Since U Been Gone,” wearing buttons that read “#IAMCHANTAL.” Their satirical specialty is the blend of insecurity and narcissism that drives certain urbane types to attach themselves to causes, from a do-gooder’s bragging monologue about how rewarding it is to work with apes to Elliott’s pitch to send designer water bottles to starving people in Africa. By the end of the show, this has become its provocative theme: the danger of thinking too big when your own life feels small.

A few elements of “Search Party” will be familiar to viewers of recent indie comedies about groups of drifty Brooklyn friends. Elliott and Portia—the catty gay man and his vain blond female friend—feel very much like younger, less damaged versions of the characters described as the Assholes on “High Maintenance.” A shrieking, faintly feral neighbor who calls Drew a “baby-cocked bitch” reminded me of a terrific scene from the Staten Island episode of “Girls.” It’s impossible to miss the physical resemblance between Alia Shawkat and Ilana Glazer (in part because, on “Broad City,” Shawkat played a woman who looked so much like Glazer that the two fell in love). But “Search Party” doesn’t feel derivative. There’s a structural genius to plugging these figures into a murky criminal mystery, which lends the show a caper-plot momentum and allows it to tiptoe into realms of physical, and not merely emotional, violence.

Still, much of the pleasure is in how well the creators fold in fun little period details—and by period I mean 2014. Dory finds a clue in a video of the ice-bucket challenge. A sad-sack dinner guest tries to make masculine small talk by asking, “What kind of porn do you like?” Portia, who is whiter than white, gets a job on a “C.S.I.”-like procedural playing “a frisky rookie cop named Courtney Garcia,” triggering complaints about racially insensitive casting. There are bohemian characters who bob on a sea of invisible family funding, and there are also jobs that are realistically half-assed, from Drew’s unpaid corporate internship to Dory’s slavelike gig with a lonely rich woman. The online world glimmers with ways to make cash quickly off older people’s perversions: Elliott mentions that he hasn’t been to Flushing, Queens, “since that guy on Craigslist paid me to throw candy at him,” while Chantal’s former roommate runs a fetish livestream that she insists is a creativity workshop. Young women in particular have a preternatural understanding of what men want, which is mostly humiliation via text messages. Along the way, the writers turn small characters into memorable figures, including a poignant turn by Rosie Perez as a fellow-obsessive whom Dory meets at a police station.

In one episode, Dory and Drew—the kind of unhappy couple who won’t admit that they are unhappy—invite Chantal’s ex-boyfriend Gavin over for a spaghetti dinner. It’s a setup that Dory has created so that she can pepper the guy with questions—and, when he arrives, he hisses at Drew, “Is this a setup?” Drew is shaken, but it turns out that Gavin thinks they are trying to pair him up with Portia. The misunderstandings multiply: there’s an awkward game of “Confess a weird lie,” a bad kiss, a stolen phone, and an angry whispered argument about the technical problem of forwarding e-mails, along with some sudden vomiting.

A scene like this could get laughs as nothing but brittle, door-slamming farce. Instead, it doubles as a portrait of a couple trying to do something awkwardly mature. Their apartment feels exactly right, with its rickety shoe rack, stacks of books arranged as decoration, bike propped behind a lamp, Stork Club ashtray, and Weimar-era print on the wall. It’s an emotional mixture that reminded me of “Jane the Virgin,” which has a similar willingness to let characters react with realistic vulnerability to absurdist scenarios. When a crazy woman ruins a party that Dory’s attending, she simply stands by the bar shaking, her hands over her face. When the members of a creepy self-help group request confessionals, Portia delivers a surprisingly affecting speech about the fact that people think she’s dumb. When a major character is caught in a lie, the show lets that revelation carry weight, and be more than a mere plot twist—and then moves on before it gets bathetic.

With mysteries, endings matter. And, miraculously, “Search Party” has the rare finale that is both tense and surprising—with a structural leap that lands. It ties up the plot and offers bloody possibilities for a second season, one that lets actions, however well motivated, have consequences. It gives viewers something to chew on, too. That’s its own kind of happy ending. ♦