That is, except for McElhenney’s character, Mac, who underwent a physical transformation in season seven and then, in season 13, performed an elaborate dance routine as a way of coming out to his father.
McElhenney saw an opportunity to take a basic workplace comedy about a video game company and use it to deconstruct his own experiences as a storyteller and world builder.
Lost isn’t even in the same conversations that.” The same is true for Game of Thrones, which to McElhenney is “bizarre.” Despite influencing literal generations of viewers , Sunny has never hit the zeitgeist quite the way Thrones and Lost did.
“So I have this long-running show , Oh that’d be great if Mythic Quest was that too.
If any of this naked ambition—a topic that is intriguingly taboo in an ambitious town like Hollywood—strikes the reader as ego-driven, the extremely self-aware McElhenney might be the first to admit it.
“Then you’re just in this giant echo chamber and what you realize is very quickly that if you’re not disagreeing on things, then you’re not getting any other point of view.” McElhenney shook things up on Sunny but made even bigger changes when he set about making Mythic Quest and brought Sunny writers David Hornsby and Megan Ganz along with him to help run the new show.
“Forget, just for a second, any moral or ethical concern with whether or not we should be putting things out into the world that are only reflecting our own very myopic points of view,” McElhenney says.
Those conflicts, conversations, and clashing viewpoints spill over into some of the show’s best sequences, like a popular season two confrontation between McElhenney’s alpha male video game creator, Ian Grimm, and his young tester named Rachel played by Mythic Quest writer Ashly Burch.
Something McElhenney was never interested in doing was filling the writers room and the show’s cast with diverse voices simply to earn himself accolades as a 40-something white man in Hollywood.
“I have a lot more friends and family members and people who come in and out of Sunny or they don’t really care about what I do,” he says.
“I’m excited that people have found the show and they’ll say things like, ‘Why did I not know this was on? Or how did I sleep on this?’” McElhenney says.
McElhenney credits Apple with stepping up its efforts in getting the word out about Mythic Quest in season two, but he also made a personal investment in reaching out to press and fans alike.
Both set in the past and populated almost entirely by non-regular cast members, these big swings at defining the larger culture that the gaming company in Mythic Quest sprang out of have been hailed as transcendent examinations of the compromises and costs of pursuing a career as a storyteller.
“Everlight” was a similarly tricky event, which saw both the staff of this fictional video game company and the real cast of Mythic Quest trying their best to get back to normal after such an abnormal year.
I think that my success in the past is helpful.” In fact, the season two finale blows up the premise of Mythic Quest in such a spectacular way you’d think it might be a series finale—but this is just McElhenney, Ganz, and the rest setting yet another challenge for themselves.
So, Mythic Quest is a rapidly growing hit for Apple TV+ with a high score from critics, something that certainly hasn’t escaped McElhenney’s notice.
But while McElhenney is careful to keep that clout-chasing side of things in check, he still has his eye on one more prize.
In a funny twist of fate, McElhenney enters this awards season in direct competition with his real-life wife and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia costar Kaitlin Olson who appears in freshman favorite Hacks.
But what Mythic Quest has behind it, besides Apple TV+ gaining momentum thanks to another awards favorite, Ted Lasso, is Rob McElhenney himself serving as showrunner, star, and tireless marketing machine.
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