Don’t Sleep on ‘Mythic Quest,’ Rob McElhenney’s OTHER Dark Comedy

This month, the world has been shocked to learn that AppleTV+ does actually employ a few people who know how to market its shows. Or, maybe, just one show: Severance. The famously under-watched platform released the first eight minutes of the Season Two premiere. The official Severance podcast booked Adam Scott’s A-list friends to talk about it. Its four leads showed up in a transparent pen at New York’s Grand Central Station, wearing their show costumes and wigs, to pretend to work at their terminals. 

It makes sense for Apple to put resources behind a show that has critics slavering in a way I haven’t seen since Succession went off the air, but it’s really overshadowed the other dark workplace comedy it’s bringing back this month: Mythic Quest, which with four seasons to its name is one of Apple’s longest-running shows, not to mention one that comes from some of its most successful creators: Charlie Day and Rob McElhenney are among the creators of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, which has produced the most seasons in live-action sitcom history; and Megan Ganz, formerly of such stalwarts as Community and Modern Family. And while Severance evidently hopes to make you think about such big topics as identity, humanity, labor and ethics, Mythic Quest just wants to make you laugh. It works on me!

Mythic Quest revolves around Ian Grimm (McElhenney), who created the titular video game and is now creative director of the game studio that’s grown up around it. That he pronounces his name “EYE-in” instead of the usual “EE-in” should tell you everything you need to know about him, but in case it doesn’t: He wears rings on every digit, is extremely vain about his physique and doesn’t live with the teen son who hates him. He would also throw a diva if he knew I told you that he’s actually just one of the show’s two co-leads: the other is Poppy Li (Charlotte Nicdao), who started the series as the game company’s frazzled, workaholic lead engineer but is now co-creative director with Ian. They’re also former partners in a spin-off company, GrimPop, the story of which took up most of the third season. 

David Brittlesbee (David Hornsby) is Mythic Quest’s executive producer, which means most of his time is spent trying to manage Ian’s ego fits and impractical flights of fancy. (Sometimes Poppy abets them; sometimes they drive her crazy.) Brad Bakshi (Danny Pudi) started the series as the head of monetization, but his career path has taken a few sharp turns, like a prison term for insider trading between the second and third seasons; when he’s not trying to amass wealth for the company or himself, he’s needling David. There’s also Rachel (Ashly Burch) and Dana (Imani Hakim), who fell in love working side-by-side as game testers; Jo (Jessie Ennis), an assistant so terrifyingly devoted to her bosses she makes Smithers look like April Ludgate; and Carol (Naomi Ekperigin), an HR/DEI head whose patience is constantly being tested by the wildly immature colleagues she’s trying to direct, but who also allows herself the professional breach of a standing weekly gossip meeting with David.

Season Three ended with Poppy and Ian accepting both that their latest venture isn’t going to work and that they need to return to MQ; and also that their dysfunctional relationship might actually function just fine, given that their quirks complement each other to form the perfect team. This was pretty predictable: Poppy and Ian’s cycle of clashing and making up is part of the show’s DNA. Several series regulars announced plans to split off from the company, which is also a recurring motif for the show’s season finales; I’d detail who and where they were supposedly going to go, but it doesn’t really matter: they’re all back. Though David’s work to turn the Mythic Quest game into a movie franchise — supported by Joe Manganiello as “himself,” leaning into his reputation as a nerd — mixed up the show’s often claustrophobic storylines, Season Three was the most uneven so far, and I was nervous that the writing staff had lost their flow.

Luckily, the fourth season — of which I’ve seen all episodes except the finale — is a major improvement over the third. Poppy and Ian’s newest idea for an MQ game expansion, Elysium, requires players to make their avatars brave and noble, with the goal of getting into heaven. It’s an exciting concept, but its execution may suffer due to Poppy’s attempts to have an actual personal life for the first time since we’ve known her. Having forced David, in the Season Three finale, to fire her publicly to fortify his authority, Jo is now working for Dana, alongside Brad; Jo has transferred her unbridled dedication to serving all Dana’s needs, while Brad schemes to get Dana out of the bad deal she made with MQ to finance her college education. This will allow Dana to reach her full potential as a game designer, beyond what she’s already achieved making a wildly popular game for Playpen, the company’s social and game creation platform, but Brad is mainly doing it for sport, and to get one over on David. 

The greatest miracle of Season Four is also its most conventional choice: It unsettles Poppy and Ian’s relationship by (no spoilers) introducing a new character who challenges them to see themselves and each other in a new light. After the often flat third season, shaking up the co-leads in this new story was an essential development. But don’t worry: McElhenney still has an apparently depthless willingness to make Ian a buffoon in new and delightful ways. Once you’ve seen him work on defining his jawline via Jawsercise, you’ll probably never forget it.

But my favorite pairing remains David and Brad. Poor David is the show’s designated victim, but he gets his own back in hilariously dorky ways (yes, even in the context of an office full of geeks). David doesn’t just talk about wanting to make male friends in his 40s; he actually does it, with a trio of first responders who join him for a regular poker night. If pretending to be as right-wing as they are is the price of doing business, David does it cheerfully, if not always convincingly. As a sociopathic genius, Brad could so easily be turned by the show’s writers into a Dwight Schrute-esque bucket of quirks; instead, Pudi’s and the producers’ deep understanding of the character make him one of the most consistent on the show. (And yes, of course we get to see what happens when David dares to take him on at the poker table, in one of the season’s best episodes.) I also appreciate that Jo will serve whichever boss hires her with the same level of single-minded intensity, but that once that intensity burns out, she has no compunction about dropping them and moving on to the next.

The show’s producers also deserve credit for knowing how much to service side characters. Former Groundlings and comedy partners Andrew Friedman and Michael Naughton started playing game-testers last season. It’s understood that these two middle-aged men were doing a job normally filled by twentysomethings because they had made some bad life decisions, and in the fourth season, a little more of that backstory gets filled out, just a few lines at a time. The temptation to use these veteran performers more must be great, but the writers are judicious in order not to exhaust the characters’ potential. Similarly, Ian’s son Brendan — aka successful video-game streamer Pootie Shoe (Elisha Henig) — is one of the only characters on the show, other than Poppy, who will tell Ian what he actually thinks of him. Even though Ian could stand to be confronted more often, each interaction has more impact if they’re rare. That said, Brendan does get to star in this season’s off-model episode — like previous timeline breakers “A Dark Quiet Death,” “Backstory!” and “Sarian” — as we see him try to redefine his online brand at this late stage of his teen years; Henig and Alanna Ubach, as his mother Shannon, make it another series high.

The potential problem with a cast this big is that, inevitably, there are going to be a couple of characters who don’t pop, and in this instance they are an actual couple. Mythic Quest keeps trying to push Rachel and Dana along the road toward intimacy, adulthood and financial responsibility, but it’s hard to care about their journey when Rachel seems like the most highly educated simpleton I’ve ever seen, and Dana just alternates between sad sack and rage monster. The show also feels retrograde in the way it valorizes Poppy’s workaholic tendencies; there’s an opportunity for the finale (which hasn’t yet been released to critics) to address that. It certainly should, particularly when even Severance characters get to deliver lines like, “Work is just work, right?” 

But ultimately, Mythic Quest is just a solid workplace comedy more people should know about. If you like It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia’s jokes per minute but wish it didn’t leave such a nasty aftertaste, this could be your next watch.