Season four of Mythic Quest wrapped up on Apple TV+ at the end of March. It was a sitcom about the people who work at a video game studio in Los Angeles. Their personalities. Their lives. The typical sitcom stuff that makes that type of show so easy to consume. The romantic entanglements of the two leads were a major focus, as were the moral quandaries, depressive self-loathing, and creative jealousies of others. All in all, it was a solid season of pushing characters into new emotional areas.
By the midpoint of season four, something clicked in my head that I wasn’t able to move past. Mythic Quest had changed since the first season. That was fair to say. Most shows change by the time they’re four seasons into their runs. But Mythic Quest changed in a way that is very specific to sitcoms. I don’t mean half hour comedies with serialized stories. No no. I mean the more episodic, situational comedy.
Many sitcoms start with a certain premise. By the time the third or fourth season rolls around, the premise has moved to the background while the characters take center stage. A sitcom that began with a certain premise or situation morphs from being about that premise into being about the characters interacting with one another while that premise exists in the background or disappears altogether.
Take a look at Mythic Quest. The first season was about the studio behind an MMORPG working out the kinks of their newest expansion, Raven’s Banquet. One episode was about how to use an in-game tool. Another was about creating the background of a mysterious character who debuted in the expansion. There was also a storyline about getting overtime for the staff and another storyline about the studio hiring one of their employees as a streamer to play and promote Raven’s Banquet. There was a little bit of character work as well, with creative head Ian Grimm getting backstory and family introduced. But the first season was primarily the inner workings of the studio that made Mythic Quest.
Fast forward to season four and the show became much less about the game and much more about the characters. The studio worked on both Mythic Quest and Playpen, a sandbox game-creation platform. Some work stuff still came up, whether it be negotiating contracts, banning certain content to keep a child-friendly game platform child-friendly, and the legality/morality of profiting off letting children create games for Playpen. However, most of those stories came from a character-driven place. The length of the meeting about what to ban in Playpen was driven by the studio manager’s desire to make friends. The negotiations for contracts were used to build the romantic relationship between the lead programmer of Playpen and one of the producers in the studio. The characters came first in a way they didn’t always in the first season.
The majority of season four was spent on the love triangle of Ian Grimm, Poppy Li (lead programmer turned creative co-head of Mythic Quest), and Poppy’s boyfriend Storm. That relationship story was the crux of everything that happened. It led to the changes in the power dynamic of the studio. It led to a pregnancy. It led to Ian somehow, maybe, starting to mend his fractured relationship with his son. It also led to the creation of a new Mythic Quest expansion, Elysium, which was hailed as one of the best video game works ever. That was the result of all the Ian and Poppy relationship stuff. Great art comes from relationships and struggle. Elysium was no different.
There were two season four episodes that really highlighted how far the show got from its situational roots. The first was a murder mystery episode. A bunch of characters from the studio went to an old mansion for a murder mystery game. Most of the episode involved Ian being jealous of Storm. He accused Storm of cheating, revealing his feelings for Poppy in the process. That wasn’t even the only relationship stuff in the episode. The whole murder mystery was built as a way for the creator of Playpen to propose to her girlfriend, a producer within the Mythic Quest studio. Nothing in the episode had to do with the video games.
The other episode was a mostly standalone episode. Mythic Quest had one of those each season. The difference this season was that it was about an already established character. The episode focused on Pootie Shoe, Ian’s son, as he tried to force himself into adulthood before he was truly ready. The only series regular in the episode was Ian, and that was only to selfishly help his son in a single scene. Pootie Shoe was a streamer who called out another streamer and challenged him to a boxing match. This had nothing to do with the Mythic Quest studio. It barely had any of the regular characters. It was an entirely character-driven episode about a side character. The closest I could say this came to being about Mythic Quest was that it was a side quest, but not in the way that the spin-off Side Quest is.
Mythic Quest fully made the sitcom flip from being about the situation to being about the characters. It’s the trajectory of numerous sitcoms throughout the decades. Community began as a sitcom about a community college and the personalities within it. It became a show about people who just happened to be at a community college. Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place was about friends working at a pizza joint but dropped the pizza place after the second season. Cougar Town began as a recently divorced woman getting back into the dating game by going after younger men. That didn’t even last a full season. It turned into a show about friends supporting each other. Even Cheers left the bar eventually.
It is inevitable that a sitcom with a limited premise will break free of that premise at some point. The longer a sitcom goes, the more it will home in on the characters and make them the focus. It allows for more stories to be mined. There are only so many stories that can be told with the concept of making a video game before the stories start to feel repetitive. Opening the world keeps things feeling fresh. Shows grow. This is the growth curve for sitcoms.
This idea has been rolling round in my head since about halfway through the fourth season of Mythic Quest. It’s kind of how my writing has evolved over time. For so long, I limited myself to writing about bad movies. Nearly a decade of just that. There was more to me, though. I wanted to branch out. Like a sitcom, I switched things up. The bad movie posts are still there. So are posts like this. So are posts about Bubly, seasons, and hockey. I opened up the other sides of me. I moved beyond the original premise. That’s what happens in sitcoms and in life.
No comments:
Post a Comment