[COLUMN] In the Fourth Season of Mythic Quest, the Personal and the Professional Collide | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the fourth season of Mythic Quest, up to the most recent episode, “Rebrand.” It is streaming on Apple TV+, and is just wonderful.

Now in its fourth season, Mythic Quest has always been fascinated by the delicate balance between the personal and the professional, the complications that can arise from interpersonal relationships within a heavily corporate environment. It is a workplace sitcom, but one particularly invested in ideas of creativity, cooperation and ownership.

The show’s fourth season is particularly interested in how the boundaries that delineate personal and professional lives seem increasingly fungible and abstract. Master programmer Poppy Li (Charlotte Nicdao) finds herself trapped in a strange love triangle, caught between her long-term creative partnership with visionary games designer Ian Grimm (Rob McElhenney) and her romance with conceptual artist Storm (Chase Yi).

Poppy and Ian are not romantically involved. Both characters have openly expressed revulsion of the very concept. However, their creative partnership has often been likened to a marriage within the context of the show, most obviously in the first season’s standout episode “A Dark Quiet Death”, which parallelled the pair with husband-and-wife creative team Doc (Jake Johnson) and Bean (Cristin Milioti). It is a true partnership, albeit one expressed through creative collaboration.

However, Poppy’s romantic and sexual relationship with Storm has clearly thrown both characters off-balance. Ian is transparently jealous of the amount of time that Poppy spends with Storm, while Storm notes that Poppy is constantly thinking about Ian. Poppy begins to develop a life outside her work with Ian, most obviously when she becomes pregnant. That is a much more literal form of creation than her game design work with Ian.

Poppy and Ian are not the only characters who find their collaboration strained by the blurred boundaries between co-worker and romantic partner. Rachel Meyee (Ashly Burch) and Dana Bryant (Imani Hakim) are two former testers who embarked on a romantic relationship that finds itself strained when Rachel moves into a management role while Dana becomes a key creative working at the company.

The couple’s professional interests come to exist in opposition to one another. “These are company secrets, not couple’s secrets” manager David Hornsby (David Brittlesbee) warns Rachel during a corporate briefing about the success of the expansion that Dana built for the company. When Rachel responds that she and Dana work for the same company, David responds, “Same company, different sides. You’re management, she’s creative.” Rachel and Dana are girlfriends, but their professional responsibilities put them at odds.

“I just realized we haven’t really talked about where we’re drawing the line between work stuff and personal stuff,” Dana tells Rachel in the office car park in “Boundaries”, the season premiere. “I want to draw the line, here. Whatever happens at the office stays on that side of the line, and we do not bring our personal problems to work.” There is an irony in this. While Rachel and Dana balance these competing interests rather well, the season’s fourth episode, “The Villain’s Feast” finds Dana proposing to Rachel while on a work retreat.

This theme of blurred boundaries between the personal and the professional plays out across the season. Carol (Naomi Ekperigin), the company’s head of human resources, engages in sexual relationships with the two testers replacing Dana and Rachel, Andy (Andrew Friedman) and Mikey (Michael Naughton). Dana’s business manager, Brad Bakshi (Danny Pudi), reignites in a sordid affair with professional rival Anna (Karolina Szymczak).

To a certain extent, this is expected. Mythic Quest belongs to a long lineage of workplace sitcoms. Many of those workplace sitcoms, like Cheers or even Moonlighting, often came to emphasize the importance of romance within the workplace. This is just how the genre works. These are shows about people who work together, so inevitably drama (or comedy) will develop from their personal interactions. It is the nature of storytelling.

However, what distinguishes Mythic Quest from so many shows operating from this familiar template is the emphasis that the show places on the overlap between the personal and the professional. In particular, the idea that these personal relationships are in some way tied to the professional work that these people are doing. Poppy and Ian are visionary game designers, and the beauty of their work derives from the interpersonal friction between them.

The fourth season pushes this idea to its extreme. The season suggests that these sorts of interpersonal entanglements cannot be completely fulfilling. In the season premiere, Storm reveals that Poppy helped him design a conceptual art piece, “The Mechanic”, a robot arm that repairs itself. Interestingly, Poppy assumed the role that Ian occupies in their creative partnership. “Poppy came up with the whole concept and I just sort of helped bring it all to life,” Storm explains.

The piece is an expression of a deep-seated anxiety within Poppy. She is horrified when Ian buys the installation in the season’s seventh episode, “The Room Where It Happens”, and puts it on the company’s floor. “Ian, do you know what this piece is about?” Poppy asks. “It’s about me. I’m the machine. And the machine can’t be fixed, no matter how hard it works and works and works. It can’t fix itself. Making this thing made me realize, I don’t want to be the machine anymore.”

Poppy emphasis on the word “works” seems important there. Poppy and Ian are both workaholics, but Mythic Quest suggests that they are both fundamentally incomplete people. In some ways, Mythic Quest makes an interesting companion piece to the other big Apple TV+ workplace show that is airing in parallel, Severance. That show is (in a very different and much more serious way) also about literalizing the challenges of the work-life balance.

Like Severance, Mythic Quest is a show about what might be termed “late capitalism.” These are both shows about “workism”, the American tendency to treat labor as an almost moral and religious ritual. Charlotte Nicdao, Ashly Burch and Imani Hakim are all millennials, a generation of notorious workaholics. However, millennials are also a generation that is increasingly burnt out, growing more and more with the lack of fulfilment that comes with that sort of devotion to work.

Even outside of the interpersonal dynamics that define the central cast, the fourth season of Mythic Quest returns repeatedly between the blurred boundaries between the personal and the professional within modern culture. “The Room Where It Happens” finds Rachel summoned before Congress to testify about the way in which the company has begun monetizing and exploiting consumer-generated content, effectively profiting from the work of young players.

“We provide a platform for people to be able to make money,” Rachel insists, convinced of her own righteousness. She laughs off concerns about “child labor”, contending, “They’re gonna play video games anyway, may as well make some money off it, right?” This is an acceleration of the sort of work-focused culture that produced Poppy, one that seeks to turn even personal recreation into a source of income and hobbies into “side hustles.”

It is interesting that Mythic Quest follows Rachel’s clumsy defense of child labor with “Rebrand”, a standalone episode that focuses on Ian’s estranged son, the streamer Pootie Shoe (Elisha Henig). Pootie has turned his hobby of playing video games into a source of income, and one that is rooted in the illusion of authenticity. He records his streams in what appears to be a regular teenage boy’s bedroom, but is subsequently revealed to be a set within his massive modernist house. It is manufactured authenticity.

Pootie has found himself trapped within the online persona that he created years ago, unable to grow and develop. “Rebrand” is effectively about Pootie trying to buy his way out of a contract so that he can break free of what was once something he enjoyed but is now a job masquerading as a hobby. His entire life has been transformed into a performance that he leverages for financial gain, but which leaves no room for any personal pleasure or growth.

Late in the episode, Pootie visits his manager, Spencer (Charlie Day), at home. It is Saturday. Pootie has no sense of professional boundaries. Spencer shares a personal anecdote about his own responsibilities as a father caring for a child with special needs. “Shit, I’m sorry man, I didn’t know any of that,” Pootie responds, embarrassed. Spencer is magnanimous. “How could you?” he replies. “You never asked.” Pootie never saw Spencer as a person, but as a function. Spencer ends the conversation by establishing his own boundaries. “So, you cool if we talk about this Monday?”  

As with many of the best Mythic Quest episodes, “Rebrand” takes the themes of the larger show and filters them through a fresh perspective. While Ian, Poppy, Rachel, Dana and the rest of the cast struggle to find personal fulfillment in a corporate environment, Pootie deals with an even more heightened expression of that anxiety. Pootie is a generation of influencers and streamers, whose personal lives are so commodified that they don’t have personalities, they have “brands.”

Mythic Quest is a fascinating show about the contradictions and challenges of late capitalism, about what work means in contemporary culture, and the challenges of trying to find and define one’s self and one’s relationship to others within those structures. Rachel and Dana seem lucky enough to have figured it out, placing firm boundaries that separate their private and professional lives, but the fourth season suggests this is not a given for Poppy or Pootie.

In a system that largely values people for the work they create, it is inevitable that the personal and the professional should begin to blur.