Mythic Quest: Quarantine was filmed with 40 new iPhones, raising $600,000 for charity

The Hollywood Reporter

Rob McElhenney says his Apple bosses were immediately on board when he pitched a quarantine edition of his Apple TV+ series. But he needed 40 new iPhones and 20 sets of earbuds in a matter of days to pull off the episode. "This was a Monday, and I said, 'If we have them by Friday, I think we could pull this off. Is that possible?'" he told The Hollywood Reporter. "There was a rep on the call who didn't skip a beat. She said, 'I already have them tracked down. They're in L.A. and I can have them to you by this afternoon.'" Mythic Quest: Quarantine was shot, edited and ready to air three weeks later. The special episode raised $300,000 from the show's cast, crew and producers that McElhenney and wife Kaitlin Olson personally matched. Apple TV+ executives are so confident in the finished product, premiering Friday, that they are submitting it for Emmy consideration. McElhenney adds of making the episode: "We really wanted to make it feel like it was a shared experience without stepping on a lot of the stuff, like Saturday Night Live, that we'd already seen. We knew right away that we can't just get away with doing Zoom jokes for 30 minutes. There was also a tremendous amount of tone deafness out there in the (gaming) community, and it was something that I hadn't seen from a comedic standpoint. And it made sense for my character, who created one of the biggest games of all time, to not necessarily understand how difficult this may be for everybody else, because he's on his compound living his best life. So it became about how do we get into those kinds of scenarios without seeming callous or tone deaf ourselves as a show?"