If Twitch and The Office had a baby, threw in some It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia veterans, and added the appeal of World of Warcraft, it would be Mythic Quest, the latest show to launch on Apple TV+.
We sat down with the team behind Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet to talk about the show, the characters, and what they find themselves playing.
Mythic Quest finds itself in a world new to television: A gaming studio. The workplace comedy genre is a familiar, if somewhat tired one, so it’s rare to bring something new to the class. That also lends itself to unique situations that scores of other shows have already tackled. That’s exactly what co-creators Rob McElhenney and Megan Ganz, who also served as executive producers for It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, were going for.
“For comedy reasons, any place we can have really big egos and very high stakes is a great thing to go for,” Ganz says. “You have these people like Ian [McElhenney], who has created this massively successful video game, but if he walked down the street, nobody would know who he is. He’s not a Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, no matter how much he thinks he is.”
The show captures the quirky messiness of The Office and characters that don’t try to be likable, as fans of It’s Always Sunny in Philadephia will find familiar. What sets it apart is its ability to deliver stories in a world familiar to so many in 2020, but not yet seen on television. And it does so from a number of perspectives. It’s not just a show about the leaders behind a popular game. We also see the developers toiling away in a dimly lit space. Fans root for the testers as they stay up all night, finding a record number of bugs to be fixed by said developers.
But it’s also easy to get emotionally invested, long before viewers reach the final ninth episode of the season. It’s hard to watch as one tester falls for another, but somehow easy to laugh when she’s called annoying to her face.
It’s why Mythic Quest provides a show that comedy fans and gamers can appreciate. It features over-the-top streamers, game testers endlessly looking for bugs, the lack of women in tech and gaming, and programmers waiting to see how fans will respond to updates.
And the Mythic Quest crew has some favorite games of their own.
Jessie Ennis, who plays the strong-willed assistant, and Charlotte Nicdao, who plays lead programmer Poppy, noted that the show is making them bigger gamers than they were before. The cast easily rattles off a list of their favorites spanning years and multiple console generations: Tekken, Pokemon, Legend of Zelda, Stardew Valley, Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, and The Last of Us. Some are bigger gamers than others, though.
“Pac-Man. What can I tell you, babe? Another century,” F. Murray Abraham, who plays the writer behind the titular game C.W. Longbottom, muses.
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