This Apple TV Plus comedy could be the next Silicon Valley
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From left: David Hornsby, Charlotte Nicdao, Jessie Ennis, Rob McElhenney and F. Murray Abraham in Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet.
Apple
Before this week, I didn’t pay much attention to any Apple TV Plus launch content. But the moment I realized the creators of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia were making Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet, a comedy about the video game industry, I perked up. Always Sunny is a crazy, broken comedy, extremely over the top. Mythic Quest is a workplace comedy about tech that feels a lot more grounded. As with Always Sunny, there’s cruelty, absurdity and a world that’s run out of control. Yet it also has moments of… kindness?
It’s hard not to think of HBO’s Silicon Valley, which skewered tech culture for years. , but Mythic Quest could pick up where that show left off: looking at the gaming industry’s many problems, including a grind-heavy workplace culture, uneven gender representation and toxic online communities. But Mythic Quest is also, often sincerely, about the love of games.
The show lands in a familiar but welcome spot for me. I worked for a few years at a video game company that made online games (Sony Online Entertainment, during the launch of EverQuest II). Some things in Mythic Quest brought me back to those years.
Mythic Quest isn’t an outsider take on gaming: Ubisoft producing it means it’s a show about gaming made by a video game company. Still, it feels critical of the machines of mass entertainment, too.