Apple TV+’s hit comedy series Mythic Quest is back for its third season, but not everyone is returning this time around - at least not to Mythic Quest. Following the end of Season 2’s major changes, Season 3 picks up a year later with Ian (Rob McElhenney) and Poppy (Charlotte Nicdao) scoping out bigger-scale projects with Hera at their newly-formed GrimPop Studios. With the two of them heading new projects, Mythic Quest is left to the hands of David Hornsby’s David Brittlesbee, now the creative director in charge.

During his interview with Collider’s Steve Weintraub, Hornsby shared the state of Mythic Quest’s company after Ian and Poppy’s departure, and how the staff is faring with Brittlesbee’s takeover. Hornsby also discussed a few ideas they have going forward into Season 4, directing his first episode, and attempting to have the gang gear up for E3, eventually leading to their quarantine episode. You can read the full interview below, or watch the video above.

COLLIDER: I'll start with the most important question first. Do you find that when Wrexham is doing better, Rob [McElhenney] is in a better mood?

DAVID HORNSBY: It definitely doesn't hurt. Yeah, he's got many interests, Wrexham being one of them. I never know how they're doing, is the thing. I can't watch the game. But as long as the Wrexham show is doing well, that's better than anything.

When we spoke at Comic-Con, Megan [Ganz] mentioned that she knows the very end of the series, what it's going to be. Has she told you what that is?

HORNSBY: No, she hasn't. Did she tell you? If she told you, you can tell me.

I actually don't want to know what the end is because I'm a fan, and I want to get there naturally. But I am curious who she's told.

HORNSBY: Yeah, I think she's told her dog.

Right, exactly.

HORNSBY: She really tells that dog everything. Maybe I'll ask the dog.

What do you want to tell people about Season 3 and the adventure that is coming?

HORNSBY: Season 3 is louder, it's faster, it's funnier. No, Season 3 is fun for us, will be fun for the audience, because we have a completely new look to Mythic Quest. Ian and Poppy have broken off, and they have a whole new office and company that they're running. We get to see David alone and how he is thriving, running Mythic Quest on his own with some new opportunities. We get to see Joe Manganiello interact with David's pursuing the star, and trying to, quote-unquote, “bag a beefcake” with Joe Manganiello for his Mythic Quest movie. There's more Carol, who is so funny, Naomi Ekperigin, and more of our characters evolving and in new situations, evolving their careers in different ways, including Brad being a janitor. So there's a lot of new looks, not just on the set, but with our characters that I think people will find exciting.

You guys were picked up for Season 3 and Season 4 together. What was that like, the behind-the-scenes and developing the arc, the storyline this season? How much are you thinking about “what are we going to do” in both seasons, and how much is sort of like, “Let's just write 3, we get to the end, and then we'll worry about 4?”

HORNSBY: I think it's more the latter. I think you have to serve the story in the present. Everyone's always trying to live in the present, right? Well, it's the same thing, I think, with writing. You plan ahead as far as you can, but you know that you could end up throwing stuff out because as you write, and as you keep hacking your way through the season, things change. You start to take a different path than you thought you were going to take. There's only so much planning you can do. It's hard enough to plan 10 episodes. I think we have a few, maybe, tent poles along the way that we have ideas for, but I think with anything, you have to know you might let those go because you'll hopefully find something even more interesting.

Pardon me for not knowing, but have you filmed Season 4? Are you getting ready to film Season 4? What's the status?

HORNSBY: No, we have not even met for Season 4 and started the room yet. We've got Always Sunny [in Philadelphia] to do, and then we'll be back with Season 4. So there's a little bit of hang time between seasons.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of that. I need that quicker.

HORNSBY: I know. Well, tell Rob to have less shows.

Exactly. You directed Episode 7, which is the first Christmas episode of Mythic Quest, if I'm not mistaken. Did you get to pick that episode, or was that the one that sort of fell in your lap?

HORNSBY: No, I wanted to direct the season, and I picked the Christmas episode because it felt special to me. I worked a lot on the script, and the story in particular, and I'm in a lot of it. Even though it makes for a more challenging directing experience, I wanted to have more control over it, as well as it feeling special because it's a Christmas episode. Hopefully, it's a bit more emotional while still having a lot of fun. It feels a little extra special. We have some extra special moments in there, and I wanted to have a little bit more involvement by directing it.

One of the things I found interesting about the Ian/Poppy relationship this season is that Ian actually feels like he's grown since the first two seasons. He's actually caring about what other people think - well, Poppy. They've left Mythic Quest, but they haven't really left.

HORNSBY: Well, you never really leave, right, in a sense? Well, you can take the person out of Mythic Quest, but you can't take the Mythic Quest out of the person, I think is what we'll find. I think Ian is constantly trying to evolve, because in a sense, just like the Metaverse, he knows things are evolving, but he also struggles with his own nature, which I think we all do as we try to grow as people. I think that's sort of the fun of his character, and of the partnership. We really try to dive deep and take that very minimal set that they have, which is sort of an embodiment of Ian's mind, it's his design, and put our two main characters in there and really see how they interact and how they struggle. That was kind of a highlight for the season for us, to try to keep diving deep. Even in our breakaway episode, we dive deep there.

Of the three seasons, which shot or sequence ended up being the toughest to pull off, and why?

HORNSBY: Gosh, anything with a lot of extras. It's always tricky. We had an episode in Season 2 that we ended up cutting, but it built to us premiering at E3. I was just thinking that we have all these episodes where you bring in a whole crowd and those become more of, just from a production side, bigger.I don't know the state of E3 at this moment, but we looked at that episode in Season 3 and said, well E3, that feels like gathering everyone in this room is not really what we're doing these days, so we ended up leaning away from that.

Honestly, the pandemic in itself has been the most challenging way to where we adjusted, but from that, I think we ended up coming up with better material and even, specifically, our quarantine episode. That was probably the biggest challenge that we then had to deal with.

The first two episodes of Mythic Quest Season 3 are available to stream exclusively on Apple TV+, with subsequent episodes premiering weekly on Fridays. Check out Collider's interview with Charlotte Nicdao and Imani Hakim, who play Poppy and Dana respectively, below: