My pandemic obsession with workplace comedies
Mythic Quest and Call My Agent have me feeling nostalgic for annoying colleagues and pointless meetings.
Like many Americans during the pandemic, I’ve fallen into a workplace sitcom rabbit hole in my television watching. This includes the recent Mythic Quest and Call My Agent!; it also includes rewatching all nine seasons of The Office with my preteen. We were not alone. There are entire entire online communities devoted to the American sitcom and discussion boards debating if obsessive rewatching is a form of dependency.
Even annoying colleagues and pointless meetings can be tinged with nostalgia when one is working alone in sweatpants from a closet. I first discovered Mythic Quest (streaming on Apple TV+) through the show’s internet-hyped quarantine episode, which was released in May 2020 just as most American office workers were settling into an uncertain future of working from home. Shot on iPhones from each actor’s home, it captured our new reality of awkward Zoom pauses, the intrusion of personal life into the computer screen, and the panicky isolation many people I knew were feeling. It was funny and cathartic, and I was hooked.
Set in the offices of Mythic Quest, a fictional multiplayer online video game, the show is a smart parody of the new creative class. The heart of the show is the collaboration and rivalry between Ian (Rob McElhenney), the video game’s creator and visionary, and Poppy (Charlotte Nicdao), the lead engineer who is tasked with bringing Ian’s vision to life. Representing different kinds of creative genius, they are locked in a tense symbiotic relationship: she craves the bravado and recognition of Ian’s position, while he envies her technical expertise.
