While I was watching the very serious drama, The Morning Show, I decided that I also wanted to pepper in some comedy. I did that in the form of Apple +’s Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet. Created by Rob McElhenney and Charlie Day of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, I knew I was going to watch it regardless of what it was about. It also didn’t hurt that when the show premiered at the start of the year it received universal rave reviews. That usually sells me on a show pretty quickly.
The show centers on a video game production company and the inner workings of their central employees. The main conflict of the season centers around narcissistic creative director, Ian (McElhenney) and neurotic lead engineer, Poppy (new to me Charlotte Nicado). While all the other characters get their time in the spotlight and the central conflict does revolve around Ian and Poppy, I felt like this was really Poppy’s show. She’s clearly very smart and passionate about the game, but she gets ignored and picked on at almost every turn. Nothing showcases this better than the very first episode where she tries to get her version of a new tool, a shovel, into the game unchanged from her original idea. She makes lots of concessions throughout the show and is sort of a work-mule, but she ultimately doesn’t back down from her goals and opinions.
Ian is the ideas guy, as Mythic Quest was a world he came up with, and Poppy is the executioner of the final product, but it’s always Ian’s vision. This leads Poppy to accept an offer as creative director for a competing company. Their tension comes to a head, and Ian finally understands Poppy’s value. It was nice to see how this ended up and the quarantine special they released in may further confirms their rock solid friendship.
Aside from Poppy and Ian, there is executive producer David (David Hornsby, aka Cricket on Sunny), who is emotionally abused by most of the employees at Mythic Quest, but he’s also nervous and indecisive at all times. He’s got a new assistant, Jo, who although presents herself as bubbly, is actually quite dark and somewhat fixated with Ian. There is Brad, head of monetization, C.W. who is the head writer of the Mythic Quest narrative, and testers Dana and Rachel. They all get to play around with each other throughout the season, but C.W. is probably my favorite. He’s older, has no clue what’s going on most of the time, and delivers some excellent one-liners.
The season starts with the launch of the second version of the game Mythic Quest, this one called Raven’s Banquet. The game sees success and sabotage, and then somewhere down the line it seems like the entire company is going to fall apart. It all starts when the game gets hacked by their arch nemesis/critic, pootie Shoe, who we learn is actually Ian’s estranged son. Then, Poppy is on the verge of quitting while the worker’s threaten to unionize. Thankfully all of the fires are put out by the end of the season, with Poppy being given the role of co-creative director alongside Ian. She also successfully implements his latest idea, Blood Ocean, which is a disease that causes the game player to bleed from both ends if you know what I mean.
A little crazy that this disease idea that kills people comes out right before the pandemic. In a stroke of creative genius, Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet manages to fix this foil by doing a quarantine themed episode, where there are a slew of video chats to try and fix the new addition to the game. Rather than just delete the Blood Ocean and pretend it never happened, Poppy decides to create a vaccine instead. Here’s hoping it’ll be that easy for all of us eventually. Either way, I loved the little additional episode and found it funnier than a lot of the content provided in the actual season. I did find the show entertaining, but I experienced very few laugh out loud moments. Still, that doesn’t make for a bad comedy. Also, I’m sure if I had a little bit of background into the world of video games, perhaps there’d be more jokes that would have stood out to me. Either way, you don’t need to be a gamer in order to enjoy this show, and while I wait on new Sunny episodes, I’ll gladly take more Mythic Quest.