The Midnight Gospel
I saw this being heavily advertised on my home Netflix screen and accurately thought, “What the fuck?” I then added it to my list to watch at a later date. I had been reading about Dan Harmon (when I wrote about Community) and he had featured on a podcast by a guy called Duncan Trussell. I then realised that this latter fellow was the driving force behind The Midnight Gospel. I was further intrigued by the fact that the animation is by Pendleton Ward who did Adventure Time.
tl;dr – Talented people were involved.
So one evening, I thought I would watch an episode. As established, I knew the talents behind it but had no idea what to expect. I hadn’t listened to The Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast and had only seen a few episodes of Adventure Time. It is really, really hard to explain. I will try by describing episode one.
Our protagonist Clancy is a bit of a dropout who lives in a dimension called ‘The Chromatic Ribbon’. In his motor-home/ caravan, he has a forbidden universe simulator which he uses to visit universes that are undergoing some kind of calamitous change. Once there, he interviews someone for his space podcast – aka his spacecast. In episode one he goes to an Earth, near the end stages of a zombie apocalypse. He meets the president, who agrees to an interview while the pair of them flee and fight the undead. It is very weird and violent.
If you are a Rick and Morty fan, which I massively am, this all sounds pretty standard. But while all the mayhem is going on, the interview is taking place and it is the sort of conversation that you might have as dawn rises over an all-night party and you are sharing a joint with someone you’ve just met but have bonded with. (Allegedly.) Or a conversation where you are on acid and chilling with a friend. (Allegedly.) At times I found it hard to focus on the wonderful, trippy, violent mayhem on the screen while simultaneously following the deep conversation about whether there is such a thing as good or bad drugs. The episode ends with a really trippy but really great idea about what it is like to be a zombie, (its really good,) before Clancy heads home.
I really enjoyed the episode but after was a tad confused. The visuals and the conversation were great and while they were thematically linked, ish, I felt like I was missing something. Some bit of crucial background. A bit of research and I discovered that in this episode, the president was actually TV celeb Dr Drew, who had appeared on the podcast. I then saw all the other celebs and people of interest who had also done the podcast and were due to appear on the show and hit play on the next.
The Midnight Gospel brilliantly blends insane visuals and ridiculously inventive stories with genuinely fascinating interviews. And once you get your head around it, it is superb. I watched the first four in one sitting. The interviews are varied and include discussions about circle of life and acceptance of death, the occult and spirituality, relationships, self-awareness and more. Meanwhile the bat-shit crazy storylines are so psychedelic and watchable, I was glued. If you want an example of a plot here are a couple with a sentence or two from Wikipedia:
Clancy visits “Clown World” as a strange mish-mash creature from a pop-up ad that infected his computer. While witnessing a couple of baby clowns getting devoured by deer-dogs, he meets a couple of them, named Annie and Raghu, and all of them are shipped to a slaughterhouse where they are converted into sentient meat mush creatures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Midnight_Gospel
Clancy earns a new subscriber named Daniel Hoops who wants Clancy to get him some ice cream. He heads to an “Ass Cream” planet, which is actually a world that has been completely flooded and meets a fish man named Darryl who has an entire crew composed of cats. Together, they crew an elaborate ship with non-Euclidian geometry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Midnight_Gospel
I don’t know how enlightening this description has been. I challenge you to watch a couple of episodes of The Midnight Gospel and do better.
I thoroughly enjoyed It. The show is weird and unique and I lived in fear of my wife walking in and asking “What the hell is this?” and expecting a response. There’s no way I’d be able to pause and explain. The Midnight Gospel is something that is to be experienced just to see if you like it. I absolutely loved everything about it. So much so that I am now listening to the podcast and am going to watch the entirety of Adventure Time.
In case the above confused you, here is a trailer to keep you that way.
