I have a confession. For the past few weeks, when I should have been doing some proper work, I’ve spent afternoons secretly bingeing on episodes of Search Party, slack-jawed and feverish, like a teen scrolling through Zendaya’s Insta.

I say ‘secretly’ because it really feels like I shouldn’t be doing this. I should be planning my next novel, reading someone else’s, or at the very least, sweeping up the mountains of soil the dog’s been scattering in the back garden. Something productive and useful. But here I am, gorging on this weird, sadistic, eye-popping series. Finishing one episode, telling myself it’s absolutely the last, and then something happens at the end – something wildly outlandish or gruesome – and I just have to carry on.

This show is just so goddamn happen-y. Stuff is happening all the time. I mean, really happening, like you wouldn’t believe. Death and birth and marriage and murder and abduction and cults and blackmail and wrong sex and massive lies and people being hit by trains. Unbelievable levels of incident. You get some shows where it’s all slow-burn characterisation and discreet, fleeting moments – I’ve spent a lot of time dwelling on references to bread in Succession – but the thing about Search Party is that they’ve gone all out for action, one thing after another, and all the things are crazy, and yet you can’t stop watching. Your eyes are literally burning, but you can’t look away. And what makes it worse is there are LOADS of episodes, so you can just keep going, scratching sofa-sores as you trawl through all fifty instalments, your eyes getting bigger and squarer with every jarring, preposterous development.

OK, let’s back up a bit, to the point where I strapped myself into this rollercoaster, before it careered off in directions rollercoasters shouldn’t go. This is the set-up of Search Party: a group of friends discover a college acquaintance has gone missing, and decide to try and find her. We’ve got enigmatic Dory, the driving force, because there’s not much else going on her life, her wonderfully lame boyfriend Drew (fun fact: he plays a cop in Stranger Things), gloriously narcissistic Elliott and flaky, hysterical Portia. None of them are very… what’s the word? Likeable? Endearing? Nice? They’re all wrong words. I guess Drew is nice but he’s annoyingly wet. A better way to put it is they’re all hugely flawed people with very few redeeming features. There’s also Dory’s ex, Julian, who’s equally awful, so self-satisfied and superior. I hate them all. I love them all. It shouldn’t work but it does.

So, Dory’s obsession with finding Chantal, the missing girl, gets out of control, and her friends are drawn into the mess. BOY, does it get out of control. I don’t want to give too much away, because I want you to watch it and spiral into an abyss of Search Party sousing, but to say the situation escalates is the biggest understatement since Michael Fish told us it was going to be a bit windy but nothing to worry about.

This show takes jumping the shark and turns it into an art form. Everyone in this show is absolutely fucking nuts. Nutbags keep bumping up against each other, making everything even nuttier. Terrible people clash with other terrible people, and the fallout is predictably – and unpredictably – monstrous. Many of the issues, jokes, storylines, are very zeitgeisty – the show has a timeliness and relevance that I could riff on for a while but HOLY SHIT, WHAT JUST HAPPENED, WAS THAT AN AXE? Jokes? Oh, yes, it’s extremely funny, in a very bad, dark way. Gags come thick and fast, just like the deadly blunt instruments, the personality changes, the blood and vomit and shit, and actual gags. Seriously. This show.

But is it a waste of my time? Or, more specifically, is it an unproductive way to spend my afternoons? Maybe not. Because I’m trying to write a story, and here I have a glut of them. What’s the collective noun for narratives? Oh *pouts*; it’s anthology. That’s no good. It’s more of a pile-up; a car crash of events, choices, consequences, coincidences, outcomes, repercussions. And I’m surely going to learn something from that, right? How to just keep going, throw things at your plot, let people act out of character, then bring them back.

If you’re wondering about the title of this blog, then watch the show to find out. You won’t be disappointed, but you’ll need to get to Series 3, and by then you’ll be in DEEP, far too entangled to extricate yourself. The only option is to keep gawping, to see if anyone will emerge from the final wreckage.

By that point, I’ll have learned everything I need to know about narrative. My next novel should be a breeze.

• Search Party – all five series on BBC iPlayer