Week-to-Week: Is The Quest still a reality competition series if it's neither a competition nor a reality show?
Plus your 4-week warning that you have until June 10 to catch up on For All Mankind
Back in 2015, I was invited to contribute to an A.V. Club feature on short-lived reality competition series, and had the opportunity to write about one of my favorite one-season wonders: The Quest, an ABC LARP-ing reality show that Paul Lee greenlit along with fellow oddball Whodunnit? as part of a strategy of filling gaps in the schedule with “risky” reality fare. It invited eight normal people into the fictional world of Everrealm, dropping them into a fantastical story of good and evil and having them compete against one another to become the “one true hero.” It was silly, it was joyful, and while it had a passionate fanbase it was low-rated, and largely has fallen out of memory beyond its most ardent supporters.
With the admittedly esoteric Lee out of the equation, ABC has shifted its focus to primetime versions of both historical and contemporary game shows, but that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t something of value to be found in these “big swings” on “little shows that could.” When I profiled The Quest back in 2015, I wrote that its chances for a reboot were high, because the premise really just depends on having contestants who are committed to the premise, and able to immerse themselves in the idea of playing a role in this story. And sure enough, with Disney+ looking to diversify its content in the ongoing streaming wars, their reality division looked at the existing franchises available and decided that it made sense to bring back The Quest, with the twist that it would feature teens instead of adults (consistent with other Disney+ reality content aimed at younger audiences).
I admittedly lamented this at the time of the announcement: part of the joy of The Quest was seeing adults tapping into their childhood sense of imagination, embracing the absurdity happening around with them earnest wonder. I could see how casting teens would effectively cut out of the middleman from a narrative perspective: whereas adults have baggage that can be translated into the arc of a hero’s journey, adolescence is all about fundamental insecurities, and exploring how those are tested in a combination of physical challenges and role-playing scenarios is a straighter shot, as it were. And so I went into the Disney+ version of The Quest more or less expecting it to be like the “Junior” version of other reality shows, following the same patterns but taking greater care to focus on the “lessons” and “growth” of the contestants, with the competition kind of being secondary to that story.
This proved to be true. Through the first half of its season, which I’ve watched since it debuted last week, The Quest is no longer really a competition series: technically there will be only one true hero that will save Everrealm (and all realms) from the villain Tavora, but there are no eliminations, and what individual rewards there are seem to be mostly there to motivate each to reach their full potential and confront their insecurities. It’s an understandable decision, and one that matches a cultural shift happening in the reality space, whether in competition series that prioritize camaraderie (The Great British Bake-Off), competition series that push back against “eliminations” (the team challenge component of Tough as Nails), or seasons of competition series where contestants just resist the bitterness of competition (this season of Survivor). It would, frankly, be weird if these teens were at each other’s throats, or if they had to abandon Everrealm if they were the last to escape a cage, or the first to be upended by a revolving tree.
However, the thing that I’ve found so striking about The Quest is that it’s not just no longer a reality competition series: it’s arguably barely a reality show at all.
In my Reality TV class, I have an assignment where I ask them to create a 5-7 minute “segment” of a Reality Show as an option to replace a paper. And in setting the parameters of the assignment, I require that it includes two things: footage of a conversation, and then interviews with the participants. This results in a wide range of different interpretations: this semester I had one student do a TikTok-style vlog reality show about dating (which is the only reason why I accepted it was shot in portrait), while another produced a mock reality show about a hapless NBA prospect. But the interviews are ultimately what is able to distinguish between a reality show and what would, in the absence of these structural elements, become more of a skit or an improv exercise, depending on the level of scripting they chose to engage in.
This is in part why I’ve been so struck by the fact that The Quest has removed interviews entirely. It would have been one thing if they had simply chosen to eschew interviews during the bulk of the storytelling in order to increase immersion in the fantasy story, but they actually went so far as to remove any kind of interviews or setup for the eight Paladins as they’re magically warped into Everrealm in order to work alongside the heirs to Sanctum to defeat the evil sorceress that killed their father. We learn their names, but only through conversation, and we get none of the backstory you’d expect to get on why these teens were chosen or chose to participate in this experience. They don’t even throw chyrons on the screen so we can learn how to spell their names, or commit them to memory as the episodes wear on.
This isn’t to say that the show isn’t finding ways to tell stories about the different Paladins. Beyond the challenges—build to capture numerous Macguffins requested by the Fates—that pit them against each other and test each one’s determination, the producers capture various casual conversations between the Paladins in each episode, and they also have the “characters” in the story—the King, the three heirs, the Oracle, the palace mage—drop in to chat with them and pull out a bit more story. There’s also postmortems after different challenges which are clearly designed for the contestants to say some of what they’d say in a “diary”-style interview.
But it’s still incredibly weird to be effectively watching an improvised drama in which eight of the participants are teenagers that don’t know what’s happening, and who never get a chance to comment on the experience outside of the diegesis of the story. There’s also entire story sequences—often 5+ minutes in length—that are entirely for our benefit, with no involvement from the contestants, and no direct impact on their story. The result is an experience that really never registers as a reality show, not because it’s filmed in a more “cinematic” style, but rather because its storytelling eschews so many hallmarks of Reality TV in favor of a mixed-format storytelling approach that is probably closer to something like Netflix’s Murderville where the actors all know the script but the Paladins don’t.
It’s a choice that Andy Dehnart of the great Reality Blurred rightfully notes is disappointing as a fellow fan of the original series:
Yet what makes this franchise so remarkable is its combination of reality TV and scripted storytelling, and I’m really missing the reality piece. I don’t even mean cutthroat competition or juicy drama, just more focus on the real people who are experiencing this amazing world.
Andy wrote his review based on the first two episodes, but this problem doesn’t fade away over time (I’ve seen five now). There’s definitely more storytelling for the contestants, but I don’t feel like the show would be worse off with an occasional talking head, or if they had done some work in the premiere actually showing us what their normal lives were like and what they were working through. There’s more of that storytelling as they start talking more with the characters, but the closer the show gets to traditional Reality TV narratives the more the absence of clarity and follow-through becomes distracting.
This isn’t to say that The Quest is boring—the story is rote, but the actors are engaging, and the points of intersection with the Paladins offer fun moments of seeing how the teens gradually assert themselves more as the story wears on. But whereas the collision of fantasy and reality (TV) was the primary mode of address for the original series, the reboot is less interested in exploring those contradictions, and the result is an experience that feels much better suited for a viewer who is able to tune out the artifice of the premise and embrace the story earnestly. For me, it’s been a bit of a disappointment, albeit one that has its own fascinating—but ultimately less compelling—spin on the boundaries of reality television as a genre.
Episodic Updates
If you’re not a paid subscriber and taking part in our weekly discussion threads, then you missed out on me subjecting folks to my evilest class ice breaker: asking them to choose what single streaming service they’d choose if they were limited to one. And yes, multiple people tried to cheat—Apple with purchased TV? Cheating—but in the end the most common answer was “HBO Max despite the interface being terrible.” So, boo-urns to HBO Max, and boo to their UI/UX development team.
You also missed out on some back-and-forth about HBO Max’s Minx in the comments of my review of the first episodes of Hacks’ second season (which will continue for paid subscribers this week), which I’m looking forward to weighing in on when I’ve had a chance to finish that show. I find that it doesn’t have a whole lot of momentum, story-wise, but ultimately I’ve found what I’ve watched amiable and am interested in what a second season unburdened by the need to integrate Joyce into this world.
While Episodic Medium has grown faster than I expected, at its core it’s still an excuse for me to be able to write about shows beyond the ones that I was previously covering. That already started with getting in on the ground floor with Severance, but when I was mapping out the schedule I knew there was one show that I was excited to write about: the third season of Apple TV+’s For All Mankind, which I caught up with last summer and was my top show of 2021. It’s arriving on June 10, and I’ll repeat what I’ve said in some Episodic Discussions: you absolutely should catch up before then, you need to watch through at least Episode 3 until you give up (the first two episodes are objectively slow), and the second season finale will be one of the most thrilling episodes of TV you’ve ever seen. Can’t wait to discuss the upcoming season with y’all.
I just finished The Quest a few minutes ago, and as one of those small but passionate fans of the first season, I too was thrown off by how different the first couple episodes of this season felt (at least after the initial shot of sheer joy at actually watching a new season of The Quest wore off). But by the last few episodes, I found I had gotten more on the show's aesthetic wavelength and was able to appreciate it in an entirely unexpected way. I didn't find myself thinking of it in typical terms of a reality show but thinking of it in terms of a narrative. I wasn't looking at it through the lens of "this contestant needs to do well to win prize money", but rather "all the contestants need to do well to advance the story".
It struck me that the Paladins were doing something more akin to playing a Telletale video game, or a game like Gloomhaven than participating in a game show, even moreso than S1 of The Quest did. The additional focus on the narrative that provided context for the challenges beyond the desire for individual success, which made both the challenges and the more cinematic parts of the narrative feel like an integrated part of a whole. All of those unusual choices, from the lack of eliminations to the semi-improvised conversations with the characters instead of talking heads, felt like they were adding up to a specific and unique viewing experience. In context of all that, I think that the use of teenagers as Paladins ended up working well, as their focus on teamwork ended up being the glue that tied all those choices together into something that helped those choices make sense in concert.
And while I do have questions from a behind the scenes/production point of view (were all of the challenges guaranteed wins for the Paladins? Was the narrative at all malleable based on their choices? Did those who won more challenges get more prize money or was there a prize pool based on collective success?), getting answers to those or Probst-ian introductions explaining all the rules would have taken away from the overall effect. The biggest complement I can pay was that I didn't find myself thinking about any that while I was watching, and after years of being conditioned on how to watch a reality competition show, I ended up appreciating The Quest's bizarre yet refreshing take on the genre.
I've only recently (during the pandemic) found myself engaging with Reality TV - stuff like Drag Race and even Love Island (US). I realized there was probably a thriving academic and tv critics discourse about it (beyond snarky recaps), so it's fun to read this kind of a post about a kind of show I have extremely limited knowledge about in terms of tropes and editing etc etc.
Anyway, in other news entirely, I am just starting For All Mankind S2 - and yeah, it's excellent, and it starts being excellent in episode 3. Thanks for being the push I needed to catch up before S3. Any recommended reading / best coverage or engagement / reviews of the show in its first two years?