On paper, it shouldn’t be too surprising that the latest Apple TV Plus original show Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet is actually pretty great. From some of the minds and famous faces responsible for recent hit comedies It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Community (Rob McElhenney, Megan Ganz, Charlie Day, Danny Pudi, David Hornsby) it features a lot of that same dark, crude, yet deceptively intelligent comedy DNA. And workplace foibles have fueled countless winning comedy formulas.
But Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet feels so much more impressive because it is fundamentally a show about video games, from their history to their culture to the people who make them. That’s a topic that rarely fares well in other media. Color me shocked then that by embracing the inherently funny drama that is gaming McElhenney and company have created Apple’s best original subscription product since Apple Arcade. Maybe all that time working on a Minecraft movie paid off.
First off, I love how Ubisoft of all publishers were the ones to co-produce this and provide much of the gaming B-roll. In the story, Mythic Quest is an MMO which has just launched its Raven’s Banquet expansion. This is a good creative choice. World of Warcraft has taught most people what a fantasy MMO is. There’s a built-in excuse for the developers to constantly be working on the same game while interacting with fans. And it allows micro-transactions to be the tragically timely source of most business meddling. But most times when you actually see a video game, it’s For Honor or Starlink or even a flash of Assassin’s Creed Origins. It’s like the producers said “we need something that looks expensive enough to be a real game but generic enough for no one to recognize.” So they picked Ubisoft.
Fortunately, Mythic Quest is strong enough to make those Comic Book Guy-esque observations more fun than frustrating. Weirdly enough, though, it’s not primarily because of the comedy. Sure I laughed here and there. The reality of video games is funny what with punk kid streamers and their massive influence on sales or how changing a single shovel might ruin weeks of coding work. But it’s that authenticity, that reality, that grabbed me first, comedy second.
That reality has room for other emotions as well. People have compared Mythic Quest’s one-off, purely dramatic midpoint episode starring Jake Johnson and Cristin Milioti to the excellent period technology drama Halt and Catch Fire. But even just staying within the realm of games you can compare it to the meta PC adventure game The Magic Circle. Not only do both projects explore the unique qualities of gaming’s particular struggle between art and commerce but they both even feature Ashly Burch and a creative director who might as well be Ken Levine. I credit the show’s gaming’s authenticity to Burch bringing her considerable knowledge to the writer’s room as well.
Mythic Quest constantly uses allusions to the real history of gaming in order to strengthen its own dramatic ambitions, ambitions we probably should’ve saw coming since that one season of Always Sunny ended with an interpretive dance of queer acceptance. From the rise and fall of iD Software to the dadification of games to the way survival horror games lose their indie edge to the struggles of women in a male-dominated field to the fact that game development is due for unionization any day now. At times this is presented with Apple’s usual glossy corporate take on progressive politics, but there are worse things.
People in the games industry lead lives as interesting as any other group who gets dramatized for a TV show. Mythic Quest’s empathetic recognition of this basic fact feels like watching a perfect comic book movie adaptation, except the comic book is my underappreciated slice of real life. Like Doom Patrol on DC Universe last year, Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet almost makes me mad in how it nearly sells me on a streaming TV service I was ready to write off.
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