All Work No Play premiered September 28th on the Twitch Critical Role channel at 7 pm PST. This is a revival of a short podcast that launched six years ago, featuring voice actors Sam Riegal and Liam O’Brien. Riegal is a recent Emmy winner for his directing work on Danger & Eggs. He’s also known for doing the voice acting for Donatello in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Mephisto Pheles in Blue Exorcist, and as Scanlan Shorthalt and Nott the Brave for Critical Role. Liam O’Brien is known for voicing Gollum in Shadow of Mordor, Reverse-Flash in Injustice 2, and as Vax’ildan and Caleb Widowgast in Critical Role.
Riegal and O’Brien profess themselves as best friends and initially began the podcast to spend more time together. Fans of their work on Critical Role have asked for years for the podcast to return. And at last, it has! But this time it is in video format. For 30 minutes, the two talk about their lives, friendship, and shenanigans while also going out and doing something ridiculous together. This episode featured them learning how to sword fight alongside friend Will Friedle (known for Boy Meets World and Thundercats).
Riegal and O’Brien have great banter together, and it makes their conversations easily entertaining and engaging. They discussed the future of the show, hinting that each week they’ll film themselves going on a new adventure and then return to the studio to discuss it as well as anything else that comes to mind. Their previous podcast is well-known for being the creation point for Riegal’s character of Scanlan Shorthalt, where he discussed with O’Brien how he could play “the worst” Dungeon and Dragons character in their upcoming campaign – a gnome bard. When the campaign wrapped up at the end of 2017, many fans felt that Scanlan was the MVP of the final battle against an ascending god.
After its first hilarious episode, we are eagerly looking forward to seeing more work from these two creative friends! All Work No Play will air every Friday at 7 pm PST at twitch.tv/critrole. VOD is available immediately afterward for subscribers of the Critical Role Twitch channel. It will also be available to watch the following Sunday on YouTube and will be available as podcasts a week afterward.
