There was a time in F. Murray Abraham’s life when he wasn’t at all interested in hearing the one word most closely identified with his career: Salieri. Abraham’s brilliant portrayal of the envious, embittered, insecure composer Antonio Salieri who becomes obsessed with wunderkind Mozart in 1984’s Amadeus won him an Oscar. But it was also the kind of role that cast a long shadow over his career.
Abraham has been working steadily ever since but it was only really in 2012, when he landed the role of the menacing Dar Adal on Homeland that he moved back into center stage. He soon became a valuable player in Coen Brothers and Wes Anderson films. In 2020, the creators of Mythic Quest, a show about the inter-office relationships of video game developers, tapped him to play the drunken, regressive, garrulous sci-fi writer C.W. Longbottom.
In a pair of stunningly shot and acted Season 2 episodes titled “Backstory!" and “Peter” centered on Longbottom’s rise, fall, and redemption, we learn that the Nebula Award-winning writer has more than a little in common with Antonio Salieri. At this point, however, Abraham doesn’t mind. “It’s been so long,” he tells Vanity Fair, “that it’s kind of cool.”
The pair of episodes follow the model of the popular, melancholic Season 1 episode “A Dark Quiet Death” starring Jake Johnson and Christin Milioti by pressing pause on the comedic jockeying for power between the rest of the staff at the Mythic Quest offices to focus on themes of crushed artistic dreams and fragile young love.
Citing award-winning TV creatives like Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Donald Glover, and Aziz Ansari, Mythic Quest star and co-creator Rob McElhenney has laughingly called these special episodes “just theft.” In truth, they elevate the series beyond a sharply observed office place comedy into something that might better be described as art. For F. Murray Abraham, the episode “Peter” was an actor’s dream. “All I did was look at the script and start salivating,” he says. “Get out of my way.”
“Backstory!” which aired on Apple Plus last week, told the tale of young aspiring writer C.W. Longbottom played with off-putting pomposity by Silicon Valley alum Josh Brener. C.W. in all his self-important, flop-sweating glory, goes to work at a sci-fi magazine called Amazing Tales in the 1970s and gets caught up in a love triangle with the brilliant Anne (Shelley Hennig) and tall, handsome, only kind-of-talented Peter (Michael Cassidy). Well, really, it’s more of a love circle and one lonely dot. At one point, a broken-hearted C.W. makes a reprehensible choice that haunts him for the rest of his life and destroys his friendship with Anne and Peter.
If the dynamic of C.W. yearning for the whip smart Anne while she only has eyes for golden-haired Peter sounds familiar to fans of 1987’s Oscar-nominated Broadcast News, rest assured the Mythic Quest writers knew exactly what they were doing. In the story’s follow-up episode, “Peter,” Broadcast News star and Oscar winner William Hurt plays the older version of the character who was surely modeled on his handsome newscaster Tom Grunick. And if Broadcast News with an Amadeus twist feels like too high-flown of a descriptor for a show about video games then, well, that just means you haven’t been watching Mythic Quest.
Hurt and Abraham come from a similar theatrical background and the pair spend the length of “Peter” ripping into each other over old wounds. “Bring Bill in here,” Abraham recalls thinking. “And we’ll show you how it’s done.”
C.W., his embarrassment over his youthful mistakes mingling with a jealousy, gets even drunker than usual. The night turns into a one-man Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf? and the 81-year-old Abraham, who spent most of this season literally phoning in his performance remotely due to COVID concerns, savors every barbed insult and drunken stagger. His operatic meltdown is made all the more hilarious for being witnessed by his young co-worker Rachel (Ashly Burch).
The revelation of C.W.’s youthful mistake in “Backstory!” calls into question the very foundation of the identity he’s been presenting for a season and a half on Mythic Quest. The show continues to ask its audience to empathize with its characters even in their nastiest moments—something the show’s very few critics might have trouble with. “Aren’t we all recognizing that life is messy and that people can be both a good person and a bad person on the same day?” McElhenney asks. “Even good and bad depends on what lens you’re looking at any situation through. If the question is, are you asking me to empathize with one of the characters? Yes. And if you’re unwilling to do that seriously, turn the show off.”
Josh Brenner’s performance as the younger version of C.W. is so perfectly pathetic that it’s difficult not to feel for him even as his insecurities turn vindictive. “Josh showed me something about my own character that I had been playing for over a year,” Abraham says. His envy of Anne’s writing talent and Peter’s good looks transform him into pure Salieri.
“They don’t know how to quit,” Abraham says of both C.W. and Salieri. “They have to keep trying and trying. No matter what happens. They are creative artists. They’re going to try until they die.” C.W. toiling away at Mythic Quest chasing the promise of a truly great story is every inch Salieri composing long after anyone was willing to listen. “After all the shit he’s gone through he’s playing the piano,” Abraham says of his Oscar-winning character. “I love that for him.”
In “Peter,” C.W. has a chance to repent for his past mistakes but until the final moments it’s unclear if he ever will. Essentially, this episode of Mythic Quest is writing another chapter of Broadcast News. What if, decades later, William Hurt’s Tom Grunick and Albert Brooks’s Aaron Altman had to sort out their history without Holly Hunter’s Jane Craig there to cushion any blows? Because Mythic Quest is the show it is, C.W. is able to claw through his own wounded pride and insecurity long enough to dredge up some compassion and love for his old friend Peter.
Abraham considers his time on Mythic Quest, after a long career, to be a “special gift.” That idea of fundamental compassion behind the witty verbal assaults, he says, extends beyond the page on this show. “I’ve done a whole lot of work and there are certain things I look for. One of it is community. To find that kind of connection and humanity is so hard because it’s so segmented.” As for his episode? “It turned out to be pretty well, by the way,” he says. It definitely did.
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