Clarisse Loughrey’s Show of the Week column, published every Friday, spotlights a new show to watch or skip. This week: The new, fourth season of Mythic Quest glides along with the smooth, comforting quality of a sitcom that’s completed its refinement process.
Mythic Quest: Raven's Banquet - Season 4
It’s laughable, really, that video games are still treated as a cultural niche. It’s a near-$200bn industry that’s talked about as if it were some obscure hobby, fly fishing for nerds, instead of a generalised pastime. There are still regular debates within legacy media about their validity as art, conducted by people who have never even experienced the multi-day cycle of grief triggered by the end of Red Dead Redemption 2.
And so, it’s fitting, really, that Apple TV+’s sitcom about video games, Mythic Quest, has quietly hummed along for three brilliant seasons while flying completely under the critical and popular radar. I never hear people talk about this show. But they must be, somewhere. And people must be watching it—because it still exists. You should, too, if you aren’t already. It’s the perfect underdog. A piece of art that feels good and valiant to cheer on.
Its latest, and fourth, season glides along with the smooth, comforting quality of a sitcom that’s completed its refinement process, one that could probably go on like this forever if both creators and audience maintained the same level of commitment. It’s a workplace comedy set within the company behind an MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role-playing game) not unlike World of Warcraft. There’s an added dash of Fortnite or Roblox now that former creative directors Ian Grimm (Rob McElhenney) and Poppy Li (Charlotte Nicdao) have dumped their company Grimmpop and brought its sandbox game Playpen, powered by user-generated content, back to their old hunting grounds.
Creators McElhenney, Megan Ganz, and Charlie Day have kept abreast of gaming trends without any of that insufferable wink-wink-nudge egotism of other industry takedowns. A running joke this season focuses on disarmingly pathetic executive producer David Brittlesbee’s (David Hornsby) chronic inability to not sound disappointed that the COVID lockdowns are over and that gaming profits are down because the majority of people can actually leave their homes now.
Mythic Quest works so well because McElhenney, Ganz, and Day have a way of embracing sitcom conventions without succumbing to them. Part of that, undoubtedly, has been carried over from their work on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, an anti-sitcom of sorts. There’s a touch of the deconstructive here, even if Mythic Quest has settled in undoubtedly more wholesome (but not too wholesome!) territory.
It humanises workplace stereotypes while regularly calling them up on their bullshit. It’s been lovely, for example, to watch former testers and hardcore millenials Rachel (Ashly Burch) and Dana (Imani Hakim) fall in love, but also a little horrifying to see these self-professed socialists get eaten up by the capitalist machine to the degree that Rachel is now the head of monetisation and Dana spends all season rueful that she isn’t top dog in the indie space because of her hit creation Cozy Galaxy.
At the centre of it all is the will-they-won’t-they dynamic between Ian and Poppy—one that, somehow, isn’t actually romantic. Yes, Ian becomes erratic when Poppy gets a boyfriend (dreamy artist type Storm, played by Chase Yi), but it’s platonic, not sexual jealousy. It’s a co-dependent bond shared by two dreamers who have built their careers together, have little else beyond their careers, and yet still have to wrestle with the possibility they’re not actually compatible as friends.
In fact, the real glue keeping Mythic Quest together is that wobbly divide between the personal and professional, or as Poppy Freudian slips, the “work-work-life-balance”. A video game company operates under the illusion of play, freedom, and creativity, but at the end of the day it’s still snapping its jaws and constantly consuming in order to keep itself alive. And that leaves the people operating its limbs unsure how much of their heart to bring into a space that demands both body and soul.
Nothing in the show has, admittedly, been able to top season one’s standalone period piece, “A Dark Quiet Death”, and season four lacks even a similar period piece to match, as in seasons two and three. There is, however, an episode dedicated to Ian’s son Brendan (Elisha Henig), a streamer otherwise known as “Pootie Shoe”, now 17 and faced for the first time with the uneasy decision of how much of himself he’s ready to sell for a paycheck. It’s here, and in a few other places, that Mythic Quest achieves that miraculous feat of being so goofy you don’t see the fist coming in to punch you in the ribs. Suddenly, someone says something that makes your heart ache. A little like the end of Red Dead Redemption 2, I guess.
