I Watched Mythic Quest and…

… it’s certainly a show that exists.

When I discovered, in the middle of quarantine, that (at least) two of the crew of (at least) two of my favorite sitcoms of all time had conspired, behind my back, to create a new property, and that its first season was already fully released for streaming, I was ecstatic. Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet is a 10-episode web series (do people say that anymore?) created by Rob McElhenney and hosted by Apple TV. McElhenney roped in fellow Always Sunny creator Charlie Day, and former Community writer Megan Ganz to create a new workplace comedy in the style of Silicon Valley, this time skewering the video game industry rather than big tech, and frankly, it works.

The show features some of my favorite actors from Community and Always Sunny, with David Hornsby (Matthew “Rickety Cricket” Mara on IASIP) playing a pushover middle manager and Danny Pudi (Abed Nadir on Community) playing a sociopathic monetization director, there was a lot of promise. To be honest, I found out about the show from Youtube suggestions while browsing old Danny Pudi BTS clips, so it wasn’t a hard sell. Considering all that, I felt at times like the cast expected an entire show to bloom merely from the presence of cult star power, but more on that later.

The Sadist Show

When I first found the TVTropes article for “Sadist Show,” it opened doors for me. So much of the cult comedy I loved appeared in this bucket, and the genre spoke to me as an alienated teenager. The gist of the Sadist Show is that you take an ensemble cast of cruel, deranged, or otherwise comically flawed characters, and throw them in a hell that is each other. It’s a departure from the “everyone loves each other” moralizing that was compulsory for most of broadcast television, and it lets creators pull the sadness and violence of humanity to center stage through approachable comedy rather than drama.

Most workplace comedies, following in The Office‘s footsteps, qualify as Sadist Shows. Mythic Quest is no exception; each character is critically flawed, miserable in their own way, and spends the entire show taking that misery out on each other while grappling with the knowledge that this is their life forever, because they’d be lost without it. The last three episodes of the main season explore this heavily through Poppy (Charlotte Nicdao), who is given several opportunities to leave and instead second-guesses herself and doubles down on her misery. This is an unusually heartfelt arc for the genre, which generally doesn’t ask the audience for this level of sympathy. Having finished the show thinking of it as a sadist comedy, it made me wonder: Is this a sadist show? Is it even a sitcom?

Yes, but also no.

Walking the Line

Episode one of Raven’s Banquet spells out the format for us: A megalomaniac boss runs a game company, surrounded by a council of conniving, vicious morons who desperately want to serve him while also despising the fact that he succeeds by doing nothing (other than “noodling” on others’ work). It’s remarkably similar to Community in its ensemble: A “born leader” with nothing but the power of suggestion, a “second in command” who is desperately trying (but failing) to be the heart of the group, a senile old coot, a nerd with no human or life skills outside a niche specialty, a gentle christian housewife who hides cruelty behind an impenetrable smile, a sociopath who takes too much joy in the worst parts of their job, The Actual Heart who is dismissed as an idiot, and The Wildcard.

All that said, it doesn’t map at all to Community‘s format, because the characters have no interest in each other. They have nothing to gain by weaseling their way into relationships, or undermining each other’s aspirations. By the time the series starts, they’ve already done that to each other so thoroughly that there’s no reason to expand upon it. For an episode or two, this isn’t a problem. We get to watch those static dynamics play out between characters to great comic effect. Brad (Danny Pudi) is a sociopath who always exceeds your expectations of what cruelty is possible in the moment. David (David Hornsby) is a pushover who bends over backwards to try to get his enemies to love him, and it never works. Poppy is an expert in a sea of troglodytes, desperately begging for a crumb of freedom that she will never get. The introduction of Jo (Jessie Ennis) seems like a point to create friction between the managers, but it doesn’t, because her boss is a wet noodle. Each meeting of the directors is formulaic, in the same way as Community‘s study table. Each member has a specific agenda to push, to remind the viewer of the position they represent going into the plot, and then they break off into their own episode arcs where that position is challenged.

Something Dan Harmon clearly understood from the first episode of Community, is that the purpose of these sorts of meetings is threefold: Have the character’s bear their narrative beginnings succinctly, set up the common plot threads for the episode, and break the ensemble into A, B and C plots. McElhenney and crew stumbled into this concept at the beginning of the second season (kicked off by a character stumbling into the bar and announcing his latest scheme) and it became the pulse of both series.

Mythic Quest seems to have forgotten all three purposes of this device. Rather than establish baselines for the characters, it simply has them each reiterate and repeat a mistake we are informed they’ve made before (or already made in a previous episode). Rather than describe a common narrative thread, it merely introduces a single Big Plot for the episode, and rather than breaking the group down, it actually just lumps them together until it’s not clear why they’re even there.

So, now would be a good time to talk about The D Plot. For some reason, the show seems to regularly forget that it has two other characters, who are given plenty of screen time but exist almost entirely in a bubble: Dana (Imani Hakim) and Rachel (Ashly Burch), a pair of quality testers who work on the same floor as management. In an episode of deja vu, it feels suspiciously like she was written in by a third party after the script was completed. She’s one of my favorite first-gen indie/web creators, and I’d consider H.A.W.P. the second web series I ever loved, but this trend makes me uncomfortable. Rachel doesn’t really even exist in the main universe, as far as the cast is concerned. She could have been (and maybe was) shot on a totally separate soundstage. She has the only romance arc in the show, and it’s just extended gay longing punctuated by invisibility, which is essentially forgotten by episode six.

The Bucket of Crabs

It’s hard to dissect something that just doesn’t happen, so I’ll focus on the main ensemble. Mythic Quest misses every mark in terms of crafting relationships, even when we’ve established that some of these characters have 8 years of backstory together. It has no reason to break pairs or triads off of the ensemble for adventures, because they have nothing to learn from each other, and no new ways to hurt each other. In The Office, Michael Scott is a lifelong salaryman and an experienced (bad) manager, but that doesn’t stop the show from immediately exploring his uniquely terrible relationships with each employee and inventing ways for him to worsen those bonds. Mythic Quest opens with a plot about Poppy and Ian fighting over a minor decision for the hundredth time, and ends with the same conclusion we’re told it always does: Poppy has her darling taken away, and Ian gets everything he wants, but the conclusion is a reiteration of the status quo. Nothing changes, even mid-arc. No one’s expectations were challenged on or off screen; everyone is exactly as bad as you think they are, and it doesn’t rock the boat.

It’s not clear to me why the writers took this path. For a crew best known for one-upping themselves and escalating beyond reason, it’s downright depressing to watch them pull punches. The season does follow Poppy’s eventual unraveling, but that’s about it. No one else gets big arcs; no one has any particularly memorable moments save for a few of Brad’s sociopathic epiphanies, and the whole thing feels like it could be an actual workplace given the state of the industry.

The show presents us with what should be a powderkeg of personal conflict and absurd, comical cruelty, and for some reason all we get is a slice-of-life dramedy where the characters occasionally break from reality. Each personality is designed so precisely to knock others down, that they never spiral off “Solving the Gas Crisis”. Some episodes get within a hair’s width of this, like Brad feeding David terrible ideas for diversity policies while Jo simultaneously violates and affirms them, but the plot fails to capitalize. It peters out until it reaches a boring, reasonable conclusion that no one even acts on.

Mythic Quest: Good or Bad?

So, do I hate it? No. It’s a funny show. I laughed most of the way through episode three. David and Brad as a pair are golden and C.W. (F. Murray Abraham) delivered a few Classic Pierces. I feel cheated by the show’s treatment of Rachel and Poppy for the most part, and while I understand that they had a lot more punches to throw at characters like Jo and Ian, things just weren’t landing. It was disappointing and sad to watch these masters of escalation, absurdity, character-meshing and genre-twisting come together to make something so sterile and ordinary. I wish I knew what went wrong, but for now it’s a passable sitcom on the world’s most fragmented, inaccessible streaming service, so make of that what you will.