Erik Adams
Side Quest is now streaming on Apple TV+.
Over the course of four seasons (the most recent of which just ended), Mythic Quest has built a fully realized, ripe-for-exploration universe around the sturdy core of a classic workplace sitcom. This is part of the reason why it’s one of the best, most reliable TV comedies of the streaming era – it doesn’t hurt that the Apple TV+ series set in the world of video-game development is also extremely funny. Hot on the heels of its fourth-season finale comes Side Quest, an entertaining anthology series that delves further into the lives of the people who make, play, and love Mythic Quest’s namesake MMORPG. The parent series has wandered down these kinds of one-off detours several times, and almost always found a worthwhile destination – most notably the first-season highlight “A Dark Quiet Death.” Yet, at a mere four episodes, Side Quest’s expansion pack feels like it ends just as it gets going.
Let’s get this out of the way: Nothing in Side Quest surpasses or even comes close to “A Dark Quiet Death”’s level of quality. It’s never as substantial as that exceptional piece of television, but the spinoff is still a good elaboration on Mythic Quest’s themes of community and boundaries. And while it’s not like Side Quest contains overly complicated links to previous episodes or puzzles to solve, some details will get lost in translation if it’s your first encounter with the fantastical realms maintained by Ian Grimm, Poppy Li, and company.
Of the four episodes, the first, “Song and Dance,” has the strongest ties to the Mythic Quest office: It follows beleaguered art director Phil (Derek Waters) in his continually thwarted attempts to disconnect for a few days. Having appeared in six episodes across seasons 2 and 3, Phil is enough of a fixture that viewers will immediately recognize his downtrodden aura – Ian (Rob McElhenney) has a history of throwing last-minute assignments at him and expecting immediate results. Ian doesn’t respect anyone else’s free time, and as we see in “Song and Dance,” that carries over to Phil’s luxury vacation with his girlfriend Maude, played by Pen15’s Anna Konkle.
Thirty minutes of Phil having his time off disrupted by calls from Ian would get stale quickly, so I’m grateful that “Song and Dance” is more about digging deeper into his personal life and psyche. This enriches the Mythic Quest universe: All we know about Phil prior to “Song and Dance” is how put-upon he is, but there’s no interior life in a running gag. We’ve seen Ian cross work-life boundaries before; it might seem like there isn’t any new ground to cover here. But Phil’s low self-esteem adds an extra dimension to the dilemma. Konkle contributes significantly to that feeling, too, hitting notes that are equal parts frustrated and loving – never too smothering, and never too cold, either.
The remaining three episodes distance themselves from Ian and the MQ regulars, which lends some additional novelty to the proceedings. Whereas Mythic Quest has boasted some big-name guest stars in the past – Anthony Hopkins, William Hurt, and Joe Manganiello, to just name a few – Side Quest avoids stunt casting, which suits the types of stories it’s telling. Not to say that this is a cast of fresh faces and newcomers, but there also isn’t anyone whose established star power or fame pulls focus or feels like an odd fit in such humble surroundings.
This also feels in line with the ways Side Quest explores how we form community through art. Games are only one piece of the picture: The second episode, “Pull List,” takes place in a comic-book store. This blind-box stacking, Magic: The Gathering card-slinging spiritual cousin to High Fidelity (the John Cusack movie and the Zoë Kravitz Hulu show) is my favorite of the four episodes, but part of me thinks that picking a favorite is a Rorschach Test for your relationship to Mythic Quest. In this case, it underlines how much the ensemble-focused episodes like season 4’s murder mystery, “The Villain’s Feast,” tend to stand out and resonate. (Besides: The more I sit with it, the more my Side Quest ranking changes.)
As the staff and clientele of Comics Galore! trade punchy dialogue about whether Superman or Goku would win in a fight and what characters they claim as Black (Elmo: yes, Big Bird: no), Mythic Quest lore blends deeper our pop-culture world. Written by Leann Bowen and Javier Scott, “Pull List” digs into what makes someone a fan, the pissing matches that sometimes result from trying to prove that fandom, and the growing tension between multiple characters coveting the store’s lone copy of the latest Mythic Quest tie-in comic. It also sets itself apart from the rest of the anthology visually, with playful graphics that pull comic–book imagery into the real world.
Each episode has its own distinct visual identity, but the overall look is still unmistakably Mythic Quest. That’s especially true of the season finale, “The Last Raid,” a screenlife story à la Unfriended or Searching depicting a milestone raid for a long-running guild. In-game graphics punctuate regular Mythic Quest episodes, and here they take center stage as one group of online friends face their greatest test: the way their IRL relationships are developing (or faltering). It’d make a great double feature with the recently released, staging-a-Shakespearean-tragedy-in-GTA-Online documentary Grand Theft Hamlet: Another sympathetic, nonjudgmental (but still funny) depiction of how video games can be a lifeline for the socially isolated.
Side Quest’s ability to explore so much new terrain through the lens of a single, fictional video game is why I wish it were longer. And while the scope may be there, and all four episodes are engaging and thought-provoking, they ultimately lack the oomph of “A Dark Quiet Death” or its second-season counterpart, “Backstory!” It falls plainly on one end of the Goldilocks principle that plagues many streaming series: Not enough episodes to satisfy our hunger for more Mythic Quest; too slight to stick with you after the credits roll. This is no more apparent than in the third episode, which imparts its message early on but lacks a punch to carry it home. Its story of a cellist learning to separate her passion and her profession (with help from the Mythic Quest score) is sweet, but not much else. Still, it’s a credit to the creative team and performers that I became emotionally invested in all of these characters’ lives within the span of 30 minutes. If only there were a few more chances to do so.
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