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Summary
- Collider's Joe Schmidt spoke with Mythic Quest's Ashy Burch and Megan Ganz for Season 4.
- AppleTV+'s Mythic Quest blends an office comedy with the ever-expanding video game industry, starring Rob McElhenney, Charlotte Nicdao, and Danny Pudi.
- In this interview, Burch and Ganz discuss brainstorming ideas from the gaming industry for the show, the involvement of the cast in the production, Charlie Day's long-awaited cameo, and crossover ideas.
AppleTV+’s Mythic Quest is one of the few places where mainstream situation comedy overlaps perfectly with the trials and tribulations of video game production. Never before has the industry been taken on in this way, with both understanding and biting humor. This marriage is by design and only possible because series creators Rob McElhenny, Charlie Day, and Megan Ganz opened their creative arms to new production options, such as casting a massively popular video game voice actor in a lead role. Enter Ashly Burch, famous for voicing games like Fortnite, The Last of Us Part II, and Borderlands. Now, she finds herself smack in the middle of Mythic Quest’s diverse cast of characters.
Mythic Quest follows a team of video game developers as they work through the ups and downs of their industry. Led by Ian Grimm (McElhenney) and co-creative director Poppy (Charlotte Nicdao), the team combats movie adaptations, game expansions, and office politics. Burch’s Rachel Mayee, once a game tester, is now the head of monetization, opening up a whole can of narrative worms. The series also stars Danny Pudi (Community) and David Hornsby (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia).
With Season 4 hitting the streamer, Ganz and Burch spoke with Collider's Joe Schmidt to discuss all things Mythic Quest. Together they talked about the intersection of the video game industry and writing a comedy series, what the series adopted from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, finally getting Day on the show, and dive a little deeper into the spin-off series Side Quest.
‘Mythic Quest’ Season 4 Is All About Bringing the Gang Back Together
“We’ve moved a lot of people around.”
COLLIDER: Mythic Quest is such a fun workplace comedy and just a great show in general. Season 1 really sets up the characters and the dynamics, Season 2 really complicates that, and Season 3 pushes them in uncomfortable and different directions. What was the direction for Season 4 when you were crafting this, Megan?
MEGAN GANZ: It was about getting everybody back together. They were very split up last year. They had sort of dueling studios, and we got a lot of fun out of that, but then we decided we really wanted everyone to come back together again and then deal with all the emotional fallout from having been separated. We've moved a lot of people around in terms of what jobs they do, like Rachel has gone from being a tester to being Head of Monetization, and we have Brad, who used to work on the management side that's now working for creative. So, we really wanted to get them all back together and then see how all of these changes would affect their dynamics with one another. It was more about uniting the studio and then making it like two games that were shoved together that don't want to occupy the same space. That's how we went into this season.
Awesome. Ashly, you have so much experience working in the game industry since before this show began. Is there any shortage of topics to mine from when it comes to what you can bring into this space?
ASHLY BURCH: No, it really becomes a thing of, like, “Okay, there's so much. We have to only pick a few things.” Because we also need room to do stories about our characters and that kind of thing. At the beginning of every season, Ubisoft sort of does like a State of the Union in terms of what's going on with games, and so the whole writers’ room can get caught up in what's going on. We had quite a few things from this last time whenever we did the writers’ room—it feels so long ago now—that had come up that we were like, “Well, we have to talk about that.” AI is a big one.
GANZ: You know what's something you brought up that we still haven't used and I really want to do is exertion noises. Ashly talks about, like, when you do video game characters, you have to record lots of grunts and hits and all this stuff. Then we were going to do a thing where, like, one of the fun days of the office was that all of the people that work there would get a chance to record exertion noises, and everybody was really excited about it. It pivoted to they all got to pitch ideas for games to David. Anyway, she brings in stuff all the time where we're like, “We'll use that.”
BURCH: There's so much. I mean, that's part of the reason that this show exists is because the game industry is so interesting and weird, but also universal in different ways that there's so much to take from it.
I mean, you played Aloy in the Horizon series, and I'm sure just the exertion of just climbing everything… There’s a lot of climbing you do.
BURCH: I shudder to think how many hours of, like, recorded grunts of me jumping and climbing are just in a server somewhere in the Netherlands. [Laugsh]
‘Mythic Quest’ Encourages Their Entire Team to Pitch Ideas
They adopted the idea from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
Image via Apple TV+
Megan, so I know your journey, just from this series has been being a writer, a producer, and then basically crafting this and working with this team. The coolest thing about Mythic Quest, especially this season, but since really since the show began, has been giving space for the on-screen talent and the people like Ashly, in this season, especially, how many people step behind the camera, whether they're writing or directing. What is that like to create such a unique production where you're affording these opportunities to people?
GANZ: It's been a great thing for us because everybody is really committed to all parts of it. I think we have a very interwoven cast and crew and writers, and that causes problems because we're all up in each other's business. It's very like the show. But what it creates is everybody can have a good idea and give it to us at any time. I had costumes people giving me ideas to put in the script. We had a DIT last season give me a thing to do in “Sarian” that I immediately put into the show. Anybody can give us an idea. So, I really love that part of the show.
We did kind of adopt it a little bit from It's Always Sunny [in Philadelphia], because the thing with Sunny is that the three show creators are also in the show, and so they're in front of and behind the camera all the time. David Hornsby and I work on that show, and David's obviously in Sunny, as well, and so we'd always seen it work really well. So when we got over to Mythic Quest, we're like, “Well, we've seen this model work.” But we weren't sure how much it was going to happen. The directing thing was been a total surprise to us that there are so many people in our cast who want to direct, and so this season, it was so exciting that we had four different actors within the show that wanted to step behind the camera. It's amazing because they care so much. They bring all these great ideas. We can feel the love in the way that they approach the material, so it's just been a total success.
That's awesome. Ashly, you started out as a writer, and it's really cool to see how much your role just in this franchise—because now it's franchise and we'll talk about that later—how has this transformed your career? You were already a very skilled person, and now all of a sudden, you're doing everything it seems like.
BURCH: Thank you. It's really wild. I moved to LA to be a voice actor. I was like, “If I voice act, I’m good, baby!” And I've just gotten, especially through Mythic Quest, so many opportunities to explore different things and to try out different skill sets. It has enriched my creative life and just my life in general so much. Whenever you step into a new position, at least for me, there's a considerable amount of fear, but what was really nice about this season was I directed the fifth episode, which is probably my biggest thing that I've ever directed, because there are a lot of extras and that kind of thing, and it was really nice to feel like, “But this whole team has my back.” Megan and David have my back. This crew is incredible. The cast is always prepared and on it and amazing. So, it's just been a really good experience in general, and I found it so creatively enriching.
Why Did We Have to Wait Four Seasons for Charlie Day?
The crew was concerned about one thing…
Image Via Warner Bros.
Awesome. Now, we finally get a Charlie Day cameo in this season. Why was this one the right time to bring him in finally, do you think, Megan?
GANZ: Well, we felt like Charlie was finally famous enough, so we decided that this was the year. He's in the Hulu ads, so.
BURCH: I mean, come on.
GANZ: To be honest, the problem was we'd always wanted to involve Charlie, but we felt that if he walked into the Mythic Quest offices, it would suddenly be Sunny because there’d be David and Rob and Charlie all together, and you would look at it, and I think it would just take a lot of viewers out. So, we wanted to use him, but we knew probably the best place for him would be in our standalone episodes, where he's in the Mythic Quest world, but he's not interacting with Rob a lot. So we were just waiting for the right episode to come along where there was a part that was just right for him, and thankfully that happened this year. We had a really good episode and a really great part that we thought he would play expertly that wasn't playing Charlie from Sunny, so it was like a bit of a stretch for him. He came along, and it was so great to have him on set. It's just always so joyous. It was really fun.
Is there a chance we could get any other Sunny cameos in the future?
GANZ: Yeah, I’d love that. I mean, Danny [DeVito]. Let's get Danny in. I mean, Danny and Kaitlin [Olson] and Glenn [Howerton]. Yeah, we would love any of them to crossover. They're all so talented and wonderful, but it's just always making sure that we preserve the world of our own show and not crack it too much. So maybe Mythic Quest characters appearing on Sunny is somewhere to go.
Related
You kind of touched on it a little bit before, but the standalone episodes always receive such praise for the uniqueness of them, and this season is no different. I was blown away by what it was, but also so timely and relevant. Great job. No spoilers. What do you feel like goes into that and what makes them special, while also retaining the identity of Mythic Quest?
GANZ: In the writers’ room, we talk a lot about the themes of the season, and so often, the standalone episode is the greatest expression of that particular theme. So, “A Dark, Quiet Death,” in our first season, the whole theme of that season was this battle between Poppy and Ian and their egos clashing, and we basically wanted to show another couple that didn't make it through that, and sort of thematically say, “Here is a version of these people that don't win, and you want your characters to win, so what can we learn from this example that we can apply?” So, we talk about that.
So this season, it was the things that we were dealing with, which was in large part, the boundaries that Poppy and Ian are trying to establish with each other, and also the ways in which Ian is not completely capable of helping Poppy in some of the ways that she needs to be helped because of things we explored last season in ‘Sarian,” like problems with his mother and things that he is. He's a great partner, except for these very specific things that he just doesn't know how to do for her, and so we really wanted to show him, and someone tangentially related to him that focused on those themes and brought them higher up in the mix. So, usually it's a theme-first conversation, but sometimes it can also be from a place of, like, “What kind of world outside of the video game world or tangentially related to it do we want to explore?”
But this year, because we had four Side Quest episodes, they got to do a lot of that, which is, like, “Oh, we want to talk about this facet of the gaming industry or that.” Those episodes, I feel like, are so cool, and it's nice for you not to have to relate them thematically to some bigger story.
BURCH: With the standalones, it always does feel like it needs to connect back to our characters in some way. Like, how is it supporting the story or stories of characters in Mythic Quest? Then Side Quest is a lot more broad. There's an episode about a woman who gets her dream job in the Mythic Quest Touring Orchestra, and then discovers that it just becomes a job, and then what does that experience look like? Then we have an awesome episode that's about a Black-owned comic book store, and it's about community. Meg and I were talking about it off-camera, actually, that it really investigates gatekeeping and how you understand why that happens and how it happens. So, at least for Side Quest, because we don't have a cast that goes through each episode, it's universal. It talks about certain things that maybe just affect fandom or creativity in general. So yeah, we have different stories that we get to tell. Then the cool thing about standalones is that they're doing those and also supporting the season as a whole.
For sure.
The ‘Mythic Quest’ Team Might Be Heading Back to School
Custom Image by Tania Hussain
So, there was a little known Always Sunny/Abbott Elementary crossover.
GANZ: Nobody heard about that.
But if you could choose a show, what would Mythic Quest crossover with?
BURCH: I want it to be like, “SVU,” or something. [Laugsh] Like a crime procedural.
GANZ: I have to say Community just because I feel like I would love Brad to meet Abed.
BURCH: That's really good.
GANZ: That would be really great. I'm not sure what the thing would be, but it feels like there's similar DNA in those two shows. Then I could be all back with my Community friends again.
BURCH: That's nice. I feel like my actual answer would be something weird, like a Korean cooking show where they all become contestants, or like a Korean dating show or something.
GANZ: Have you seen Physical 100?
BURCH: Oh, it's so good.
GANZ: Let's do that.
BURCH: Let's just do that. We'd all get out immediately.
Mythic Quest Season 4 is available to stream on AppleTV+.
Mythic Quest
Release Date February 7, 2020
Network Apple TV+
Writers Katie McElhenney, Ashly Burch, John Howell Harris, Aparna Nancherla, Naomi Ekperigin, Kyle Mack, Keyonna Taylor, Randall Valdez-Castillo, Emma dePaulo Reid
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Charlotte Nicdao
Poppy Li
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English (US) ·