Apple TV+ Launches ‘Mythic Quest’ Spinoff

If there’s one thing Apple TV+’s Mythic Quest loves, it’s a detour. This has been true since the very first season, which paused midway through for a one-off about two characters we hadn’t met before and haven’t seen since. It’s remained so through subsequent seasons that devoted entire episodes to detailing the backstories of members from the core ensemble, or catching up with a minor character we hadn’t seen in years.

Now it extends all the way to the series’ first spinoff, Side Quest. As the cute title might suggest, this is essentially a Mythic Quest that’s nothing but those standalone chapters — that steps well outside MQ HQ to explore the other corners of the show’s universe, one quirky tale at a time. But as it turns out, a detour’s only a detour when there’s a set path to be deviating from. Without one, it’s just an aimless, if largely pleasant, wander.

Created by Mythic Quest vets Ashly Burch, John Howell Harris and Katie McElhenney, Side Quest begins in a place that will be familiar to fans of its predecessor. The premiere, “Song and Dance,” is the most overtly Mythic Quest-y entry of the season’s four half-hours, to the point where it feels less like the start of a new project than a leftover segment from the old one.

It focuses on a character we already know (Derek Waters’ perpetually put-upon art director Phil), and features a cameo by an already existing lead (Rob McElhenney’s Ian Grimm, pestering Phil with ever-more-unreasonable demands). Plot-wise, it’s another variation on the well-trod “MQ staffer has no sense of work-life balance” formula. It even ties directly into mainline Mythic Quest by showing us the other side of a phone call we’d seen referenced a few weeks earlier on that other series.

But the fact that it begins with Phil on vacation with his beautiful and patient but increasingly frustrated girlfriend (Anna Konkle), rather than in the office, is a subtle but crucial distinction. While a typical Mythic Quest arc might see an employee’s workday derailed by their personal issues, this choice subtly reframes the dynamic so the job becomes the thing impinging on the parts of Phil’s life that actually matter most to him. It’s the opening argument in what will turn out to be a recurring thesis for Side Quest: the idea that there might be more to life than this game.

In that vein, the third outing, “Fugue,” serves up another account of an artist nearly undone by her devotion to her career — this time a cellist, Sylvie (Annamarie Kasper), buckling under her own perfectionism after landing a dream job with the Mythic Quest touring orchestra. Parts two and four jump over to the consumer side to visit with fans, but place the emphasis less on their love of the game than the opportunity it represents for them to connect with other people.

If the broader themes don’t vary much, though, the styles do. Side Quest’s anthology structure — none of these self-contained arcs have anything to do with the others, and aside from “Song and Dance” have little connection to mainline Mythic Quest — frees it to experiment with form and tone, to agreeably varied effect.

The fourth in this quartet, “The Last Raid,” follows Team Dab Queef, a group of high school buddies gathered for a long-overdue play session. Lightly echoing Mythic Quest‘s 2020 standout “Quarantine,” it plays out completely over a screen — we’re mostly watching in-game footage of avatars battling monsters while the players bicker over headsets, only occasionally displaying their real faces in video chat mode. The plot becomes a testament to the power of such digital spaces to bring people together, but also their limitations: In the end, despite the best efforts of team leader Devon (Van Crosby), not even the gravitational pull of a virtual watering hole can keep together a friend group that’s been drifting apart IRL.

And episode two, “Pull List,” feels so much like its own thing that it might as well be a backdoor pilot for a whole other Mythic Quest spinoff. Written by Leann Bowen and Javier Scott and directed by Mo Marable, it’s a hangout comedy set within a comic shop owned by the dedicated but exhausted Janae (Shalita Grant).

Her customers represent a lively cross-section of the geek community — brash misfit Cherry (Bria Samoné Henderson), the thirst trap cosplayer Mike (Rome Flynn), old timer Earl (William Stanford Davis) and so on — and they serve up a specifically Black take on nerd culture while also finding a diverse array of opinions and tastes within that purview. While its comedy can occasionally veer too mannered, with chunks of dialogue that feel like repurposed bits from a stand-up set, it’s refreshing to get such a clear-cut perspective. It’s also simply fun to kick back and hang out as this group argues over who’s got the most nerd cred or riffs on which characters they “claim as Black” (Skeeter from Doug, Piccolo from Dragon Ball Z, the Teletubbies because they’re “a group of friends singing, dancing, living their best life — it’s basically Living Single“).

But if “Pull List” represents the most promising of what Side Quest has to offer, it also highlights the oddness of this enterprise.

On one hand, it’s endearing how keen Mythic Quest is to get to know the more obscure recesses of its broader universe. On the other, it’s not always clear what these yarns gain creatively from being positioned as Mythic Quest spin-offs, particularly when (unlike alt-histories like For All Mankind or outright fantasies like Marvel) the show’s reality isn’t much different from our own. A standout like “Pull List” works well enough on its own that the tenuous link to the original property seems unnecessary. Meanwhile, a sweet but thinly conceived entry like “Fugue” doesn’t feel richer just because Sylvie and her colleagues theoretically breathe the same air as Ian and Phil.

The best of Mythic Quest’s detours have been the ones that have deepened the main narrative’s themes or the people within it. “A Dark Quiet Death” distilled and refracted its central ideas about art versus commerce. “Backstory!” or “Sarian” expanded our understanding not just of the characters at their center but the passions and tensions they bring with them into their work.

Side Quest, presumably, means to do the same. But the distance it puts between itself and its parent proves as much a curse as a blessing. Siloed off into a separate realm, these odds and ends struggle to find much of a way forward on their own.