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Season 4 of a TV show isn’t something I write about very often, since my focus is video games. But season 4 of Mythic Quest is another matter.
Debuting with the first two episodes on January 29 on Apple TV+, the show brings the workplace comedy back to a video game studio. The ensemble cast returns with stars including Rob McElhenney (as mercurial creative director Ian Grimm) and Charlotte Nicdao (tech leader Poppy Li) and more. The show is good at skewing the sometimes ridiculous culture of the video game industry, and it’s on brand because it was originally created by Ubisoft.
The show is silly as usual, but I like how one of the opening scenes concerns Play Pen, a user-generated content gimmick aimed at reviving the studio’s core online game. During the second episode, the users are all busy making sex games and the studio has to figure out what to do about it. David enlists the help of the studio’s ethics committee to find the answer. And, of course, AI is the next big trend that is asymmetrical in the show.
Game tester Rachel (played by Ashly Burch) has now been named the studio’s head of monetization. She will have a hard time being more evil than Brad Bakshi (played by Dani Pudi) in making money.
Studio boss David Brittlesbee (played by executive producer David Hornsby) continues to be caught between studio executives and corporate headquarters. It’s still too real when it comes to references to silly things in the gaming industry. Under Overview, I checked it.
The opening show, Boundaries, lays out the new responsibilities and boundary lines drawn by the characters as their lives change. Ian and Poppy joined the studio after retiring on their own. But Poppy, always the programming workaholic, isn’t working as hard anymore because she has a new boyfriend. It’s interesting in that the show acknowledges the problems of real-world game development, like too much crunch, or long hours of work, often unpaid. So, of course, Poppy creates an AI version of herself to work for her and help Ian with his middle-of-the-night shine shots.
The season will have 10 episodes, with the last one dropping on Apple TV+ on March 26.
Mythic Quest is executive produced by McElhenney and Charlie Day under their RCG banner, Michael Rotenberg and Nicholas Frenkel on behalf of 3Arts, and Margaret Boykin, Austin Dill and Gérard Guillemot for Ubisoft Film & Television. Hornsby and Megan Ganz are also executive products. The series is produced for Apple TV+ by Lionsgate, 3 Arts Entertainment and Ubisoft. The first three seasons of Mythic Quest are now struggling globally on Apple TV+.
In the new season, the show also has an expansion of the Mythic Quest universe, Side questwhich explores the lives of employees, players and fans who are touched by the game in an anthology format. If you need a break from CNN/Fox News all the time and our current political landscape, I recommend Mythic Quest like a nice diversion.
