[COLUMN] Side Quest Is More Mythic Quest, and That's a Good Thing | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece discusses all four episodes of Side Quest, the Mythic Quest spin-off now streaming on Apple TV+. Both shows are delightful, and well worth your time. 

There is a tendency to take reliability for granted, particularly in terms of pop culture.

There is an understandable urge to fixate on the novel or the exceptional, the striking or the transgressive. This makes a certain amount of sense. After all, there is simply more to say about something that is different and new. It’s easier to rave about a film or a television show that is transcendent or that pushes boundaries, that experiments with form and narrative, or simply takes something familiar and pushes it in a bold new direction.

At the moment, a lot of the discussion of Apple TV+ tends to focus on the rollout of Severance. This attention is, to be clear, entirely merited. Severance is an exceptionally well-made television show that is bristling with ambition, intention and meaning. It is a show that stands out in the modern television landscape, and which compares favorably to almost any television series currently on the air. It is fun to talk about, so of course people are talking about it.

However, there is a flipside to this. There is a tendency to overlook media that is simply very good at what it has chosen to do, film and television that is consistently solid, without necessarily calling attention to itself. This also makes sense. It is harder to find new and exciting ways to talk about a television show that is simply as good as it always has been in many of the same ways that it has always been good. As such, this sort of work tends to get unfairly overlooked.

To remain within the framework of Apple TV+, the fourth season of Mythic Quest ran almost in parallel to Severance. While it’s possible to overstate the similarities between the two shows, the two shows compliment one another very well as studies of the challenges of balancing a personal and professional life in the modern late capitalist era where it seems like the value of a person is often measured by their productivity.

However, Mythic Quest is not quite as formally stylistic as Severance. While the show is exceptionally charming, both well-written and well-performed, it is a much more conventional workplace sitcom than something like Severance. It has familiar characters, dynamics, set-ups and pay-offs. It is not too dissimilar from network sitcoms like Abbott Elementary or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, an obvious point of comparison given the involvement of Rob McElhenney and Charlie Day.

This is not to say that the show lacks ambition. It has shown a willingness to experiment with form and narrative, with off-format episodes like “A Dark Quiet Death”, “Quarantine”, “Everlight”, “Backstory!”, “Peter”, “Sarian”, “The Villain's Feast” and “Rebrand.” Indeed, Mythic Quest marked the end of its fourth season with the release of a spin-off show Side Quest, which feels like a collection of four of these narratively experimental episodes released as a companion piece to the parent show.

It can occasionally feel like Mythic Quest never gets the respect that it deserves. The production team seems to acknowledge as much. McElhenney announced the renewal of the show for its third and fourth seasons in a video filmed with Anthony Hopkins, calling to share the news. “That’s great,” Hopkins replies. “What is that, exactly?” Hopkins, who was Emmy-nominated for his guest spot on the show, proceeds to forget its name and McElhenney’s name on the call, before praising Ted Lasso.

This is charmingly self-effacing, and it speaks the appeal of Mythic Quest, a show that never quite managed to break out like Severance or Ted Lasso. There is something commendable in a show that is very good at doing what it does, delivering consistently and reliably on its premise in a way that feels organic and earned. It is something that is very hard to talk about in mainstream pop culture, because the impulse is to channel attention towards the newest, shiniest, most exciting thing.

Indeed, there’s even a tendency for audiences and critics to tire of once-exceptional shows that have run for multiple years, doing the same things to the same high standard, but lacking the novelty. There is a real “… but what have you done for us recently?” vibe to criticisms of the third season of The White Lotus for once again delving into the vacuous nature of wealth and entitlement. At a certain point, is the show repeating itself or is it simply being itself? At what point is criticizing a thing wanting it to be something else entirely?

The four episodes of Side Quest are delightful, but they are also very much of a piece with the larger thematic and narrative concerns of Mythic Quest. “Song and Dance” and “Fugue” are both stories about what it means to work in a creative field, balancing the personal and the professional. “Pull List” and “The Last Raid” are about the strong and unlikely interpersonal bonds that can form in these capitalist and commercialist spaces, the connections that people form through this art.

These four episodes are very good at this. “Fugue” follows a young musician named Sylvie (Annamarie Kasper) who has devoted her life to her art, but who finds her passion and enthusiasm fading as she turns it into a career. “I’m having trouble connecting with the music,” Sylvie confesses as she enters a downward spiral, realizing that the job does not fulfil her the way that she hoped it would.  “I can’t see it the way I used to.”

The orchestra’s conductor, Maestro Gustavo (Esai Morales), explains his life to her. “Music is my love,” he tells the younger performer. “My heart beats with it. But it’s not my job. My job is to report to a board, to fill the seats in the theatre, a thousand emails a day from idiots, it’s eating alone at a restaurant in a city I won’t get to see. I have learned to separate my music, to do my job.” It’s beautiful and heartwarming. It’s thoughtful and insightful.

This theme is mirrored in “Song and Dance”, the first of the four episodes and the one with the strongest ties to Mythic Quest, being built around recurring character Phil (Derek Waters) and featuring a guest appearance from Mythic Quest lead Ian Grimm (McElhenney). “Song and Dance” follows Phil on vacation in Hawaii with his girlfriend Maude (Anna Konkle), trying to establish professional boundaries with Ian, between his work life and his personal life.

These episodes are a nice reflection of the central existential crisis that Poppy Li (Charlotte Nicdao) is working through over the course of the fourth season of Mythic Quest. This is not a criticism. Aristotle argued that drama was about “the three unities”: unity of place, unity of time and unity of action. Given that Mythic Quest is a show about a massive multimedia franchise rooted in an online game, it makes sense that Mythic Quest and Side Quest are linked by a fourth unity: a unity of theme.

Indeed, the very idea of unity itself is central to both “Pull List” and “The Last Raid”, both of which are stories about characters carving out space for themselves in these geek cultural frameworks. “Pull List” is about a comic book store in an African American neighborhood, managed by Janae (Shalita Grant), frequented by customers who rarely actually buy things. They seem to hang out there because there is simply nowhere else to go. Forget the three unities, what about third spaces?

“You know, before this shop was here, this was a check-cashing place?” Earl (William Stanford Davis) challenges his fellow pseudo-customers. “And before that, it was a bail bonds dealer. And y’all know how much I love the strip club that was here. But this place is special, and Janae has worked hard to make it that way.” There is a sense that this space, as corporate and monetized as it is, is the closest that any of these characters have to a community.

This theme echoes in “The Last Raid”, a story about teenager Devon (Van Crosby) gathering his friends play a round of Mythic Quest that only underscores how the group has grown apart over the years. There is a sense that this is a place that matters to Devon, and that this online game is a communal and bonding space for him. This is another point of thematic unity between Mythic Quest and Side Quest, as Mythic Quest is a show in which the most profound relationships are professional.

Both Mythic Quest and Side Quest keep finding new and interesting ways to express this idea. “Fugue” uses a nice visual motif to symbolize the creative spark that is dying in Sylvie, as the music around her seems to shift out of key. “The Last Raid” is effectively a “screenlife” episode, told entirely within the world of the game itself, with the human characters only appearing briefly in video calls. It is not like Mythic Quest is just repeating itself. It’s just being thematically consistent.

It is fascinating, because this makes it hard to talk about Mythic Quest and Side Quest with the praise that they deserve for delivering so consistently and so assuredly on their core thematic concerns. The shows are about what they are about, and they are about them in interesting and clever ways, but it can be hard to celebrate Mythic Quest and Side Quest without falling into the trap of repetition and cliché. It’s easier to rave about something transcendent or transgressive.

This is frustrating, because there are very few shows in production at the moment that are as steady and as sturdy as Mythic Quest. It feels like something of a disservice to describe Side Quest as “more of a very good thing”, to describe it as like an anthology consisting of four standout off-format episodes of Mythic Quest. However, it also is a large part of the appeal of Mythic Quest and Side Quest. It is the charm of these shows, that they know what they are doing and how to do it well.