Binge-r #177: Mythic Quest: Raven's Banquet + The Pharmacist
Game On: Rob McElhenney (Ian) and F. Murray Abraham (C.W.) in Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet
MYTHIC QUEST: RAVEN’S BANQUET S1
Streaming Service: Apple TV+
Availability: All nine episodes now streaming
In Apple TV+’s new workplace comedy you actually see the work happening: set at a development studio shepherding the world’s most successful mass player online game, Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet (named for the game and it’s latest expansion) is about the friction between creativity and commerce, digital ego and the ownership of ideas, and the strange acceptance of spending ten hours a day with someone aggravating. The show’s creators – Rob McElhenney, Megan Ganz, and Charlie Day – all stem from the acerbic and evergreen It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but this 21st century satire is both sweeter and, for better or worse, discursive. An episode might tackle white supremacists playing the game, or a lead character suddenly dealing with a family situation. The laughs can be piercing, or bittersweet.
“Can you hear yourself?” frustrated lead engineer Poppy Li (Charlotte Nicdao) asks the game’s narcissistic creative director, Ian Grimm (McElhenney). “No, but I wish I could,” he nobly replies. “We should be recording this for posterity.” The two, tied together by their complementary skills, are the show’s fulcrum; in an earlier age they’d be Sam and Diane from Cheers. But the show is staffed with ace supporting players, including Community’s Danny Pudi as mercenary director of monetisation Brad Bakshi and F. Murray Abraham as a faded 1970s fantasy author obsessed with back stories and booze. The character of Jo (Jessie Ennis), a PA who worships Ian despite not working for him, is a cheery sociopath who keeps derailing office convention, while there’s a lovely side-plot in the unspoken attraction between two lowly bug testers (Imani Hakim and Ashly Burch).
The fifth episode is a standalone piece, directed by McElhenney, about the slow dissolution of both a relationship between two game designers and their creation, which is close to masterful, but also a reminder that occasionally the rest of Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet can fall a little short. Sometimes that’s just sticking to comic expectations instead of rewriting them, but measured across the entire first season, with a second already commissioned, the series is a success. For all the loot crates and motion capture work referenced, it works as a character piece. The show might delight in sending up C.W.’s love for “emotional attachment” and a good “through line”, but it does the same itself.
Father Knows Worst: Dan Schneider in The Pharmacist
THE PHARMACIST (Netflix, all four episodes now streaming): Like many true crime series, there’s a degree of investigative obsession to this compelling story, which begins with a grieving father, Louisiana pharmacist Dan Schneider, trying to solve the 1999 murder of his drug-addicted son after the local police ignore the case. But what endures is how loss and the need for satisfaction can be unending and yet also transformative. The Pharmacist moves from a single rupture to a nationwide epidemic, as Schneider’s day job makes him a witness to the growing opioid crisis that starts to decimate successive generations through initially innocuous prescriptions, but it never loses the cruel intimacy it fosters. Schneider is a remarkable subject, both for his humanity and diligence. Fearful of losing evidence, he recorded everything he did over the years, which subsequently allowed the documentary’s directors to craft a detailed narrative. There are twists and revelations, but it never loses touch with its protagonist. And lest you think this is an American failing, a recent report noted that opioid-related deaths in Australian skyrocketed between 2010 and 2016.
>> Further Reading: Apart from one informative and practical episode on female pleasure (the third), The Goop Lab on Netflix is exactly what you’d expect from a docuseries based on Gwyneth Paltrow’s wealthy wellness brand: ludicrous, questionable, and horrifyingly watchable. I wrote about the pseudoscience content for The Age [full review here].
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
New on Netflix: The Taylor Swift documentary Miss Americana (2020, 85 minutes) shares many qualities with its famous subject: an authorial imprint, revelation as a form of framing, and a willingness to reach a limit and no further – it shows you a great deal, but not all of it is illuminating; Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver (2017, 113 minutes) is a fun automotive remix of the action film, but it loses something when it settles for merely being an action film.
New on SBS on Demand: The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them (2013, 123 minutes), is the combined version of two films from writer/director Ned Benson – one from the perspective of Jessica Chastain’s Eleanor, the other from James McAvoy’s Conor – that reveals a married couple’s physical and emotional separation with tender, spare strokes.
New on Stan: High-Rise (2015, 114 minutes) is a curious adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s classic dystopian novel, but the rigid 1970s production design and Tom Hiddleston’s opaque performance make sense together; Ivan Sen’s follow-up to Mystery Road, outback procedural Goldstone (2016, 106 minutes), brings back Aaron Pedersen’s Indigenous police detective, Jay Swan, for another exemplary crime thriller.
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