Episode 93: The Midnight GoSpel and Other Timing Issues
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It may run counter to so much I’ve already said on this podcast, but I think if I had to explain exactly what makes a podcast different from any other medium, I’d have to think about it. Especially when you get to the whole ‘two dudes talking’ genre of podcasting. Now, this inability to explain it is independent of the technical side of things, of course. Those parts are all pretty obvious. A radio talk show comes out of the radio, and a podcast comes out of an RSS feed. Also there’s a whole way of setting it up. Editing that goes into it, etc, etc. That’s pretty clear. And yet, there’s also another element to it, and that’s the part I’m having trouble explaining.
I’m pretty confident that if you just played me audio of two people talking, I could tell you if it was a podcast or not. And I don’t even mean a popular podcast that I might have heard one time when I was riding in a friend’s car or in an Uber or Lyft. I mean, there is a distinct feel to a two-dudes talking type of podcast versus any other two people sharing a conversation. And that’s the part that’s hard to explain, but I know it’s a thing I can do. Because there’s this show on Netflix that I started watching on a whim a few months ago, and you know, I knew it was a podcast despite all the lovely animations.
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Hi. It’s M. Welcome to Episode 93.
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I have a lot to say about today’s topic, so this is going to be a two-parter. I want to talk about The Midnight Gospel, a Netflix original that came out earlier this year that I think I’ve watched a dozen times or more. Like seriously, I’ve heard Netflix is apparently checking in on people who watch one show nonstop, and I am super paranoid about being on that list for any show especially this one because so much of my television viewing habits are based in repetition. To the point that it might be something to talk with a mental health professional about. Not that it’s a detriment to my life, exactly. but it’s an interesting quirk. And additional insight would be greatly appreciated.
The Midnight Gospel is presented as the standard Netflix original, and while they each have their own quirks or reasons for existence, this one really buried its lead.
To start, it’s an animated show--for adults because the subject matter is dark and heavy--created by Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward and comedian Duncan Trussell. It was released on Netflix in April of the year of our pandemic 2020.
As for the plot, The Midnight Gospel is set in a dimension known as the Chromatic Ribbon. And if that means nothing to you, fair enough. There’s some nondescript world building that happens during the run of the season, but it’s not so concrete of a world that I can easily describe it to you. There’s a lot of technology, a lot of inhabited planets or universes, and some drugs. We follow a spacecaster (emphasis on caster) named Clancy Gilroy who owns an unlicensed multiverse simulator. Through it, he travels to bizarre worlds that are often on the brink of disaster, and it’s never really explained why that is, but as he goes, he is interviewing some of their residents for his spacecast (emphasis on cast).
You see, in reality--literal reality--Duncan Trussell, the voice of Clancy, has a podcast: The Duncan Trussell Family Hour, and it’s from those episodes that the audio is lifted and then adapted, rearranged a bit before adding visuals. The sort of bookends to Clancy’s adventures are original audio, from what I can gather, recorded specifically for the show, but all of that is written in such a way to accent and supplement the material adapted from the podcast.
In terms of theme, there’s a certain heaviness to the audio recordings selected for the show, including an episode featuring audio from a podcast episode recorded with Duncan Trussell’s mother just before she died of cancer. All the selected episodes touch upon a sort of existential dread that almost feels intimate to talk about or to hear other people talk about. And I’m not kidding. The show is heavy and outright depressing despite the sometimes cutesy figures drawn. It deals with notions of death and drugs and our perception of reality. It’s a lot of the things we don’t want to think about.
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Which isn’t the entirety of the podcast, I should add. I’m trying to catch up on the episode catalog, but there are a lot. So hold off on those thoughts, for now. As for the next two episodes, I want to talk about two different aspects to The Midnight Gospel specifically. First--and this week--I want to take the show at face value and consider it for what it is. Second--and the next episode--I want to talk about the art of adaptation as it is seen here. Even though I could tell that it was clearly once audio from a podcast, that didn’t detract from the experience of watching The Midnight Gospel, in fact, it only led me to appreciate it more.
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Anyway, for now, there’s a lot to say about what this show is and means to me. And it is rooted in who Clancy is and becomes. Or doesn’t become. See, Clancy might want to be the equivalent of a podcaster IN SPACE, but he’s somewhat fallen into it. And it’s not even that he’s fallen into a successful version of it. He struggles to get any listeners, and there’s a scene where he loses one of the few he has: a friend of his who might only be listening because of that friendship. Oh, and the thing he’s depending on for this spacecast? That unlicensed machine. You know how it’s unlicensed, right? Well, it’s because he couldn’t get a licensed version. Or an unlicensed version without his sister’s money.
Some details of his life are withheld, but we can tell that he’s been struggling for a while. In the same way a lot of people were even before the pandemic, when all the work on the show was done and all the choices were made. The choice to release it in April was really a joke. It was April 20th. You know? 4/20--a cannabis oriented holiday. Also Duncan Trussell’s birthday, interestingly enough. The fact that it happened well within the CoVid-19 related global shut down is an unfortunate coincidence. Or fortunate coincidence. It just depends on how one wanted or felt compelled to spend that time. Because Clancy’s inclinations likely mirror our own right now. Or not just right now. Always but we’re usually a lot better at avoiding them.
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In some ways, Clancy’s spacecast is an attempt to fill his day in a meaningful way or a way that helps him find himself. He doesn’t appear to be traditionally employed, though who knows what that would mean in the Chromatic Ribbon, and so he has a lot of time on his hands. Like all of us do right now. At least more of it. I certainly have more of it, and I’m using it the best I can. For me, this time at home has been an opportunity for many things. Without the commute, it’s a chance to sleep in a little longer each morning. I can make homemade lunches every day and spend more time with my cats. But in the silence of cat naps, there ends up being a lot of self-reflection. And I don’t quite know what I’m looking at when that happens. I just know I don’t quite like it. Existential dread packs quite a punch when you are pretty much staring into the proverbial void.
And look, I’m lucky that I kept my day job, and I’m under contract so losing that job is going to be somewhat challenging. And it’s a good job. I’m doing good work. In fact, I’ve done quite a bit with life so far, but it still feels… hollow, meaning that I am easily shaken. Like seeing the wrong person on my social media feeds that I don’t follow but apparently I have a mutual with is enough to send me spiraling. Honest to goodness spiraling.
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Because that job or me doing that job isn’t what I could have been or what I was expecting to be, by many standards. Factually speaking, some doors have been closed for me. Whether it be my fault or not. I lost the opportunity to potentially go after my dream career when I was a senior in university. And even if I’ve landed on my feet and like the life I have, I’m still missing parts of that old dream. There was a reason I wanted to go into academia, even if those reasons aren’t that strong or wouldn’t have held up. But maybe I could have been… braver or better. Maybe things didn’t have to be this way.
That, my friends, is called a regret. I have a lot of them. That one might be interwoven with fears that I made the wrong decision, potentially many wrong decisions, and won’t do all the things I want to do. There will be things I miss out on. Things I fail to do. There will be a day when I am nothing and a day when everything I have done will be nothing. And you can hope it will be in that order, but you never quite know.
And whether it be from the novel coronavirus or not, there will come a day when I die. And I don’t think anyone entirely knows what that means. Same thing with loss, even though we’ve all experienced that.
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And yeah that got dark pretty quick, didn’t it? That’s just how these things are. All the parts of our lives that we want to shy away from are pretty tightly packed, which is another reason to avoid them. Once we start down this slide, it’s hard to know when we’re going to hit the bottom or what we’re going to find there.
But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t start to explore it, right? I mean, we’re going to have these fears regardless. Sometimes they are louder than usual. Sometimes they demand to be seen. Other times, you don’t have to pay attention, but they never fully leave you. Or us. We just don’t realize that we all have those feelings. We start to think that’s not so, that everyone else is fine, not panicking deep down, and then we’re left worse off. We’re left alone in our distress, watching the rest of the world go on, unsure how we’re supposed to jump in, if we can even jump.
Existential fear or dread is the mood for 2020. For all the chaos and all the things we have to fear. Of all the promised destruction that takes on so many different forms, our fears and our emotions are the common element. It’s who we are, in many ways, so perhaps this was inevitable. For the sake of our survival we have to be afraid of the unknown, of the questions we cannot answer, but there are so many unknowns. So many of the challenges in our life involve an uncertain outcome. Which isn’t something I’ve done well with.
Look, I’ll admit, if I get too frightened or concerned about how a book or movie ends, I’ll jump ahead to the ending. I want to know what happens just to get whatever emotions I need to go through out of the way. I don’t do well with build up. But in real life, you can’t jump ahead. Sp everything is build up until it isn’t. But you can’t control when the narrative of your life gets to the point and finding out that answer is either impossible or it means you are at the end of something, which would then mean there’s a whole host of other things to consider.
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So the human mind wants a cathartic release, right? Or that’s what I want, at least. I need some sort of catharsis, and while that could come from talking to other people about it, that’s not the sort of thing we’re supposed to do outside of very specific contexts. Like therapy. And therapy’s great, but you can’t sit in your therapist’s office for hours and hours on end and certainly not permanently. Also your relationship with your therapist is a professional one, meant to help you construct a plan moving forward, not just to be a crux upon which you can lean on.
But you will need that crux. You will need people to talk to as a social creature. You will need interactions and consolation. You need people in the moments of strife and heartache. Friends and family or even accommodating strangers. But that’s not an easy thing to find.
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In The Midnight Gospel, Clancy’s nature and place in his life makes him inclined to consider these things. He’s not suffering in the classic sense, but he doesn’t have a sense of purpose or direction besides his spacecast. Now a job isn’t an end all or be all, but it’s nice to have… some place to go everyday where you know the sort of work you’ll be doing. It’s nice to have a set of people to interact with regularly. It’s nice to have something to show for your time at the end of the day. To a great extent, Clancy doesn’t have that. He also doesn’t have a strong relationship with his sister or maybe some of his other friends. There’s nothing for him to anchor himself to daily and then orient himself from as he makes plans for the future. Which isn’t all that special. Some of us currently don’t have that. Even if we still have our jobs and friends and families, that doesn’t mean we have a strong sense of direction or purpose or movement or any other immediate assurance. He is inclined to feel as I and many of us do.
Clancy’s spacecast ends up being an exploration of these larger issues as he--wide eyed and inquisitive--lands in these unfamiliar situations, drawing in those he runs into. Yes, the audio is adapted from a context in which such deep conversations would be expected and encouraged, but it still makes sense in the course of the show. After all, Clancy’s portrayal across the board is friendly and warm. He seeks to know his conversation partner better and wants to understand the circumstances in which they find themselves--or where he finds them, it could really go either way. Clancy is the sort of buddy you would want in a rough time, and yeah, he introduces the same parameters as you find in the original audio, i.e. would you like to participate in a special type of broadcast of some sort, and so the characters are proceeding like a guest on a podcast would, but still, if Clancy showed up in my life and asked me to be on his spacecast, I’d probably agree despite how often the worlds he visits fall into absolute chaos afterwards, so that’s not good but still I-- What’s done is done.
Regardless, Clancy as a character is designed to be someone the other characters and the audience connect to. And ultimately, that ends up being what The Midnight Gospel as a project comes to represent for me: connection.
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Look, it is a good show. I don’t doubt that even in better circumstances, it would be a show that I love and revisit. But right now especially, as we are all more literally isolated with these larger questions, it hits close to home, as we are all left thinking more about our place in the universe, our regrets, our values, and our deaths. We can’t physically connect and these are things we struggle to bring up when we are connected as a general rule, but we need something, right? We need something to validate and talk us through our fears. And The Midnight Gospel manages to do that. It offers a proxy conversation partner or partners, composed of people--or characters voiced by people--who confront these difficult realities regularly, either through philosophy or experiences.
The Midnight Gospel soothes our existential dreads, dreads that hit us in the darkest hours of our life. The sorts of moments that--even if we can overcome them--still leaves their marks. Honestly, this idea of material that soothes the soul at a certain hour is invoked by the title. The New Testament Gospels are holy books that Christians find solace in, but for everyone, there’s the Midnight Gospel. There’s a brief dip into the despair we know so well right now, but it’s a guided one. No matter how lost we and Clancy are, we can find our way through it.
It is connection, yes. It’s a connection to the darkness, but I always walk away from that last episode feeling strangely hopeful despite the uncertainties therein. Maybe it’s just a matter of being in the moment.
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This has been a production of Miscellany Media Studios with music licensed from the Sounds like an Earful music supply. Thanks for listening! Find more information about our shows at miscellanymedia.online or follow us on Twitter @miscellanymedia for updates on current and future projects.
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