Rob McElhenney’s ‘Mythic Quest’ Spin-off ‘Side Quest’ Proves Once and For All That Too Many Things Have Been Franchised

I’m not the first to note that entertainment studios’ terror of gambling and losing on original stories has made it so that nearly every project that makes it in front of our eyes — including literally all 10 of last year’s biggest movies — belongs to a franchise. We all know the big ones, but this goes beyond the MCU, the DCEU, Star Wars, Star Trek and the Disney princesses: We’re now living in a world where The Big Bang Theory is about to launch its third spin-off. Even shows on AppleTV+ — a platform that, famously, no one watches, and that we just learned is losing its parent company more than $1 billion a year — are becoming franchises: as Mythic Quest spins off the anthology show Side Quest, I think we can officially say franchise fever has gone too far.

Since it’s extremely likely that this is the first time you’re hearing about it, Mythic Quest is a sitcom, set at the video-game studio that produces the titular game. (Though real game developer Ubisoft produces the show, the Mythic Quest game is fictional — for now.) Some of the show’s stories revolve around issues typical of any workplace show, like competition between ambitious colleagues or the stress of working for a difficult boss. Others are specific to the milieu, like adapting the game as a movie or figuring out how to relieve overburdened moderators with A.I. The show’s creators are Charlie Day and Rob McElhenney, stars of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, with McElhenney doing double duty as mercurial creative director Ian Grimm; and Megan Ganz, who came to It’s Always Sunny after writing at The Onion, Community and Modern Family.

It makes sense that Apple wants to extend its relationship with the creative minds behind TV’s longest-running live-action sitcom, and that’s why we have Side Quest. In this anthology series, each episode portrays characters connected, to varying degrees, to the world of Mythic Quest. At just four episodes, it seems fair to call it an experiment — and not a particularly successful one.

As the few dozen viewers of Mythic Quest know, each season features one episode set outside the season’s main timeline. Season One’s “A Dark Quiet Death” features a pair of partnered game developers, played by Jake Johnson and Cristin Milioti, and checks in with them from their first meeting in a video-game store, through co-creating a game and a company together and to the end of their relationship; it’s not until the episode is almost over that we understand their connection to Mythic Quest. It’s still the top-rated episode according to IMDb users, which may be why the creative team thought an “oops all breakouts” spin-off could work.

One of them almost does. In “Pull List,” the second episode, fans are waiting in a comic book store for a highly anticipated issue of the Mythic Quest comic book. The store’s owner Janae (Shalita Grant, the best thing about her seasons of both Search Party and You), her most loyal customers and a random guy trying to impress his stepson are all Black, and eager to get their hands on an issue rumored to feature a pivotal storyline for MQ’s first major Black character. The episode is set entirely in the store, which could make for a stagey execution. However, this one is very well-cast — Leonard Robinson from Insecure plays the stepdad, and Abbott Elementary’s William Stanford Davis plays Earl, a tabletop card player who hangs out in the store waiting to battle his tween nemesis Melvin (Anthony Carr Jr.). It portrays what feel like real issues for the Black nerd community, from gatekeeping fandom to the limited number of Black characters available to cosplayers. Mostly, it’s just a great showcase for the delightful Grant, who should be headlining her own show by now — and yes, the episode does make the world of the store feel lived-in enough to sustain its own full spin-off, but I want more for her.

The other three episodes, unfortunately, feel like pitches that were rejected to be Mythic Quest stand-alones. The first is the only one to feature characters we’ve actually seen on the main show: Phil (Drunk History creator Derek Waters), MQ’s ever-anxious art director, is trying to enjoy a Hawaiian vacation with his girlfriend Maude (PEN15’s Anna Konkle), but Ian keeps interrupting to harass him about hats for the forthcoming spin-off game Mythic Dance. The episode doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know about how controlling and pushy Ian is, and a character as one-note as Phil has been on Mythic Quest can’t sustain the whole half-hour.

The final episode, titled “The Last Raid,” concerns a group of recent high school grad friends trying, with differing levels of commitment, to keep their MQ guild together as life pulls them apart. The episode takes place almost entirely in the game, so even though we hear the characters’ voices coming through, their avatars are minimally animated and make it even harder to engage with a cast we already weren’t going to see after the episode ends.

The toughest sit is “Fugue.” Real-life cellist Annamarie Kasper plays Sylvie, a passionate classical musician who lands her dream job in the orchestra that tours playing the Mythic Quest score. As is so often the case (including for many of the people who work for Ian, not that he’s to blame in this instance), the job isn’t as transcendent as Sylvie had hoped, forcing her to re-evaluate what’s most important to her. Sylvie’s disappointment takes up almost all of this grindingly repetitive episode, making its 33 minutes feel a lot longer.

Writing on a show must often feel like a series of missed opportunities: a character just passing through could feel so rich with possibilities that you wish there were a way to use them again, or imagining a storyline’s logical conclusions takes you beyond the borders of what your series can reasonably do. I’m sure writing these episodes was fulfilling and fun for the Mythic Quest producers who took the time away from their main gig to do it. If watching them had been as fulfilling and fun for me, I’d have a harder time saying the Mythic Quest universe has probably expanded as much as it needs to.