Rob McElhenney has already made some serious Hollywood history. Last year, the first show he ever created—It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia—was renewed for a 15th season, making it the longest-running live action TV show in history. Part of the secret of Sunny’s longevity, McElhenney likes to point out, is that despite the show’s ambitious swings, its core characters of old friends stubbornly refuse to change. 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 went through grueling physical regimens to pull off both.
And with Mythic Quest, which wraps up its astonishing second season on Apple TV+ Friday, McElhenney is feeling similarly ambitious. 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. As various members of the Mythic Quest office vie for power, the central relationship is between McElhenney’s narcissistic Ian Grimm and his second in command Poppy Li (Charlotte Nicdao). The flavor of Ian’s respect for Poppy transforms over the course of the first two seasons from useful lieutenant to irreplaceable creative partner all without a whiff of romance. Poppy’s growing voice in the company ripples down to the other women and people of color in a way that never feels ham-fisted or agenda-driven. In short, Mythic Quest’s surface-level premise is hiding one of the most poignantly complex stories being told on television and McElhenney, for one, is determined it not stay hidden.
As a longtime fixture of the TV landscape, McElhenney has forged close friendships with some of the medium's most celebrated showrunners like Lost creator Damon Lindelof or Game of Thrones showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff. (He’s also appeared, briefly, in both shows.) He wants a taste of what they’ve had.
“Two billion hours of Sunny had been watched as of like 2020. Something like that.” he tells Vanity Fair. He recalls telling Lindelof the same, to which Lindelof replied: “Lost isn’t even close to that. 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 (not to mention making an unlikely Gen Z folk hero out of Danny DeVito), Sunny has never hit the zeitgeist quite the way Thrones and Lost did.
“So I have this long-running show [in Sunny] but we were like an indie band that never blew up—which has been great,” McElhenney says. “There’s a part of me [that thinks], Oh that’d be great if Mythic Quest was that too. But then there’s another part of me…. Do I want Mythic Quest to hit the zeitgeist?” McElhenney says. “Of course, of course I do.” When I point out the enormous pressures that come with zeitgeist shows like Lost or Thrones—specifically the scrutiny around ending those shows—McElhenney concedes, ”You gotta be careful about what you’re chasing.”
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. But the magical ingredient that makes Mythic Quest a growing, bona fide hit for Apple is the way McElhenney put his ego aside to build both a writing team and a cast that constantly challenges and pushes back on his world view.
Like many young showrunners just finding their sea legs in Hollywood, McElhenney staffed his first seasons of Sunny with writers who saw the world the way he did. “You’re in charge, you want to surround yourself with people you agree with because it’s easier,” he says. “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.
The writing team they put together for Mythic Quest is diverse across every quadrant: gender, race, age, and experience. “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. “It’s just straight-up boring. It’s a boring way to make something it’s a boring thing to watch because you're just being pounded by one person's opinion.” Diversifying that room, he says, has “led to incredible conversations and certainly conflict, but the best kind of conflict.”
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. “A lot of the conversations that those two characters have are based in conversations we’ve had,” McElhenney says, “which are basically like, ‘Hey I’m a 44 year-old man, you’re a 20-something young woman. We dramatize it and put it in the show and take the extreme versions of both…. Sometimes we’re right, sometimes we’re wrong. Sometimes we can admit we’re wrong. Sometimes we can’t. That’s why it’s funny and that’s why it’s interesting to us to write.”
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 do see a lot of pandering. If I’m being honest,” he says, “I see a shitload of pandering, and Meg and I do not try to do that. We try desperately to make sure that what we’re doing is for the right reasons. To try and make something authentic, to amplify voices because it makes the work better. Not because we think we’re supposed to do it, or because we’ll get pats on the back or because someone will write something nice about us.”
Two seasons in, McElhenney is seeing his investment in Mythic Quest paying off. “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. “A lot of those kinds of people are emailing me and calling me and texting me [about Mythic Quest]. Certainly there’s a lot more engagement on all the social media platforms. Then you get hard data to support it, which is Apple coming to us and saying the show is a massive success for us.”
That wasn’t the always the case. Like most of the Apple TV+ shows, Mythic Quest took a bit of time to find its audience. “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. “I’m super excited that they’re now on it, but I’m also frustrated because I’m asking myself the same thing. Why were we not able to reach people? I think it was just a function of Apple finding their legs. They started a studio. Regardless of the scale and size of the company itself, starting a new studio is difficult and it’s going to be rife with issues.”
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. (In all my years writing about TV, I’ve never seen a creator write quite so many personal letters, emails, etc. to press.) “I just love this show,” McElhenney says when I ask him about his level of involvement in the marketing arm of Mythic Quest. “I just love it. I love working on it. I’m so proud of it and I just want more and more people to see it.”
An added point of pride McElhenney is able to take in Mythic Quest is his work as a director. McElhenney has only directed two episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s long run, but he’s already stepped behind the camera for four episodes of Mythic Quest, all of which are considered massively ambitious highlights of the series. Two stand-alone episodes—season one’s “A Dark Quiet Death” and season two’s “Backstory!”—serve as beautiful mini-movies within the larger context of the series. 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.
The other pair of episodes McElhenney directed—“Quarantine” and “Everlight”—served as the two-episode bridge between seasons while Mythic Quest grappled with COVID delays. (The impact of the pandemic meant series star F. Murray Abraham had to spend most of the second season beaming in his performance from home.) “Quarantine,” filmed on tablets and cell phones, is one of the few successful pieces of art to come out of the pandemic, featuring Mythic Quest's signature blend of clever comedy innovation and pure emotional devastation. “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.
The ramp up of ambition in the second season with its narrative departures and special episodes comes, McElhenney says, with Apple’s full-throated support. “They understand it when I come in say, ‘I want to do something a little bit weird here,’ I think some of that has to do with the fact that the work speaks for itself. I think that my success in the past is [also] 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. “I see that we have a hundred percent on Rotten Tomatoes, which means every single critic that watched it gave us a positive review,” he says. “Of course that level of validation is a huge part of why you get into the business in the first place.”
But while McElhenney is careful to keep that clout-chasing side of things in check, he still has his eye on one more prize. As in, a literal prize. (It is, after all, Emmys season). “I can understand why people don’t care about awards because that’s just so dicey and something that’s so clearly subjective,” he says. “But for anybody to say, ‘Well, I don’t care what anybody thinks.’ I just don’t buy that for a hot second. If you didn’t care about getting some level of validation then you wouldn’t be doing the thing at all.”
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. “We got advanced copies of it and I was floored,” he says. “I was like, what you’re doing is truly inspiring. This is a really fantastic show. I’m so proud of you. Then I turned to Kaitlin. I’m like, ‘Because it’s on HBO, it’s going to get the due that it deserves and that’s wonderful.’ The thing that becomes a little bit frustrating is that not everybody has that HBO sheen and the HBO machine behind it.”
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. If Mythic Quest never hits the zeitgeist in the way he’s imagining, it certainly won’t be because McElhenney himself ever stopped trying.
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