The Quest

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God this sounds awful!

The Quest review: Reality game of thrones
New ABC reality series goes the swords-and-sorcery route, but it lacks magic.

The Quest, ABC’s latest reality TV series, debuts on Thursday with a shameless plea to lovers of fantasy and other self-identifying geeks. The show asks its 12 contestants to fake like medieval knights—which they do thanks to activities like living in a castle, wielding spears, bowing to a queen, and meeting creepy witches in the woods.

But for the producers who dumped real people into a Tolkien-obsessed world, that’s not enough. These “paladins” apparently all have a greater purpose beyond a cash prize or D-list celebrity status. Contestants don’t take long to reveal the massive chips on their shoulders, many of them recalling a younger life when they didn’t fit in, when they wore headgear and giant glasses, or when they hid with books or video games.

So only now, wearing leather armor and clutching the broken shards of the ancient “Sunspear,” do they see a path to confidence and redemption. The quotes come flowing while the dozen players take their first steps toward the show’s world of Everrealm: “It was my fate to embark on this journey,” one says, while another goes a little further: “I want to show the little kid I used to be, who was so shy and so quiet, that he doesn’t always have to be that way.”

ABC sent us the first three episodes ahead of tonight’s series debut, and watching them didn’t convince us that the show had conjured a rich fictional universe worthy of geeks’ utter allegiance. Still, we finished our marathon Quest session thinking that the show was intriguing (and awkwardly hilarious, like all “bad” reality series), particularly in carrying the torch for TV’s apparent next big wave: the plot-driven reality show.

One of reality television’s most formative moments came from combining an always-on documentary treatment with wild challenges. 2000’s Survivor, inspired by a similar Swedish series, not only ushered in a new wave of ratings-busting TV, but it also forever left the traditional game show format in the dust.

That’s a shame, because game shows have typically proven a safe space for geekdom, from the trivia bombardment of Jeopardy to the bizarre, virtual-reality-fueled competitions of ‘90s UK show Knightmare. Those kinds of series don’t really exist in the West anymore, and we’re not comfortable saying that the “academic” challenges from the CW’s Beauty and the Geek count as an exception.

We kept our fingers crossed for years that someone would option our series, tentatively titled Academic Decathlon, as a return to nerdy, question-loaded group challenges on TV, but we didn’t even think about another path reality TV could take to geekdom: the Tolkien road.

The Quest begins with 12 contestants meeting in what looks like an office basement, eventually receiving lanterns and emerging in a riverside forest. The notion of universe and lore comes on thick from the outset: They meet three women, known as the Fates, and are told that they have to save the kingdom of Everrealm by eventually using a weapon called the Sunspear, which is currently broken into 12 pieces (convenient!).

Other than the contestants, everyone on the show is an actor. In that sense, The Quest also draws inspiration from ABC’s Whodunnit, a 2013 series that plumbed the depths of American stupidity. That show asked contestants to solve a fictional murder-mystery plot, and losing players “died” at the end of each episode, prompting hundreds of American dummies to express their shock and dismay on Twitter as if these people had actually been murdered.

While Whodunnit was painfully silly (and entertaining), it also opened the door to the idea that a reality show could revolve around a season-long fictional plot. In this early state, The Quest already fares a little better; its actors find a tolerable balance between solid acting and diving into the cheesy stuff, while the show’s setpieces—castles, war outposts, enchanted forests—receive considerable care in their design (though occasionally, the “hub town” castle looks a little like something you’d see inside of a Great Wolf Lodge).

Still, the laughs come pretty quickly thanks to how contestants react to their new kingdom. In the show’s first 10 minutes, a random actor is surprised by a hairy, ugly beast in a nighttime forest, and the cast’s “keeper,” a man named Creo, insists that they keep running.

Shondo, an amped-up contestant with an MMA fighting background, isn’t down with how that situation turned out. “We should’ve helped him, man,” he shouts at the actor after their escape. “Hey, we never let that happen again! Man, come on!” (Chill out, Shondo. That guy was union; he’ll be fine.)

The majority of Quest’s laughs come from such over-earnest, out-of-touch reactions from contestants buying into the show’s fictional world. Lines like “I have to do this—it’s for the queen!” are silly enough, but then there’s the utter cheese of someone frowning with all sincerity at a potion’s ingredient list. “Dragon’s tears? How do you make a dragon cry?”

These moments seem to be knowingly placed to fulfill the modern reality-TV quota of laughing at the shlubs in the competition, but for the most part, the show takes itself just as seriously. This proves a little unbearable when the usual reality-show challenges drag on for far too long without much punch or payoff.

The best is a weapons competition, where contestants ride on horses while shooting bows and swinging hammers at targets, while the worst is a boring “puzzle” room that only asks people to use brute strength and power through a few weird doors. Everrealm’s “queen” and her hangers-on watch and comment while relying too heavily on archetypes: the gruff soldier here, the suspicious advisor there.

If ABC wanted to ride the mainstream momentum of Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, it would’ve been wise to invest more in the show’s fictional characters and lore. People don’t get hooked to massive RPGs and expansive fantasy book series without a feeling of place—centuries of turmoil, families that have survived the lands for generations, great wizards who oversee the ne’er-do-wells—but The Quest doesn’t get that luxury, as it must also juggle the stories of its contestants, particularly the silly reality-series alliances that form. Contestants must vote every week to remove one of the two worst players of a given challenge, so ABC devotes a good 5-10 minutes of each episode to snoozer politics, as opposed to even contestants’ backstory (let alone the grand world of Everrealm).

Other than Shondo, the amped-up MMA fighter, the series’ contestants can be easy to lose track of in terms of being remarkably generic, save the overly serious Adria and the heart-of-gold Bonnie. It’s Bonnie who decides on a whim to invent, and sing, a song about the world of Everrealm to the rest of the cast. For a second, the song seems embarrassing, but then it proves to be more heartwarming and likeable than much of what ABC manufactured with its fictional world.

And that’s the crux of The Quest’s problem: ABC put together all the trappings of a “if you like Game of Thrones, you’ll love this” reality series—the castle, the horses, the cheesy mystery that emerges—but it has yet to deliver a real sense of heroism, either by fictional plot or real contestants. We hope ABC gets that part right later—or at least jacks up the special-effects budget for a legitimate dragon. We can't let the tears go to waste.

[Passdagas the Brown]

So horrible.

[Impenitent]

It sounds almost Pythonesque, but lamer.