‘The Midnight Gospel’ Is The Trippy Existential Animated Series For Our Time

It’s perhaps a mark of this surreal period that one of the most interesting and engaging escapes out there cross-pollinates Duncan Trussell’s deeply philosophical podcast conversations with DayGlo-bright dystopian animation from Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward and Titmouse Studios.

The Midnight Gospel’s eight-episode first season debuted this week on Netflix. Its heady visual and intellectual discursions might be just the brain-bending food for mind and soul that we need to navigate the isolation, fear, death and disunity now raging around us.

“It’s that surreal quality of having conversations that seem normal. Meanwhile, just outside your house, there’s something floating in space,” Trussell said. “There’s something in the podcast interview style that produces this intimacy. It’s one of the reasons that people love them. If you’re a celebrity, you’re limited to six minutes on aa late-night show, so how do you get to know them? (The podcast setting) produces this moment that people really connect to.”

Midnight Gospel’s absurdist juxtapositions of speech and image improbably remind me of Nick Park’s Oscar-winning 1991 animated short, Creature Comforts, and his succeeding TV series in Britain and the United States. In those, zoo animals mouth the anodyne observations of everyday Britons, to often surprising effect.

The conversations are considerably more twisty and intellectual, but no less surprising in The Midnight Gospel.

Protagonist Clancy Gilroy transports to a different simulated planet each episode, where he records a “spacecast” with a denizen there for uploading to the universe. The resulting deep conversations – from talks with notables such as Ram Dass, Damien Wayne Echols, Will Oldham, Raghu Markus, Jason Louv, and Dr. Drew Pinsky – dive into a lot of heady stuff about spirituality, existence, life, mind-altering drugs, mind-altering meditative states, and more.

Those conversations, drawn from Trussell’s long-time podcast, Duncan Trussell Family Hour, are interwoven with Ward’s delightfully over-the-top imagery. Peter Max would be pleased.

In the first episode, Pinsky is not only a medical doctor discussing issues of addiction and drug use but also president of the United States during a zombie invasion. As Clancy and the president fight their way in distracted fashion through waves of zombies, Pinsky holds forth on his belief that, “there’s no bad drug.” It’s about how we use these chemicals that each have a variety of negative and positive effects. Eventually, the zombies “win,” but it turns out being a zombie isn’t so bad either.

It’s important to note that I discovered when reviewing the show that Episode 4 features Trussell’s conversation with Trudy Goodman of Insight L.A., a prominent Santa Monica meditation center. Goodman is a noted speaker and Buddhist meditation teacher, Not incidentally, she’s also a close friend of my wife and attended my wedding. In the episode, her character is called, amusingly, “Trudy the Love Barbarian.”

The Goodman conversation – mostly about life, death and practicing to listen to others – is set in a Gothic horror backdrop with a vengeful would-be lover bent on ending the world. And yes, in a time when the pandemic has killed more than 50,000 Americans, hearing Trudy the Love Barbarian talk about forgiveness and actively listening to others is a Good Thing. (Trussell also just interviewed Goodman and her husband, prominent Buddhist author and speaker Jack Kornfield, for his ongoing podcast).

Both episodes nicely encapsulate how the show manages to find a through line, connecting those deep conversations and Ward’s whacky animated worlds in a way that actually works while also being frequently funny and consistently engaging.

“Figuring out just the right places to glue the dialogue to the animation became one of the great challenges of the series,” Trussell said. “There were really scary moments. Lots of these (streaming-video shows) go straight to series, but there’s some usefulness to the pilot. It’s a test. (Instead,)We had to take a 3-minute proof of concept to Netflix. I had this scary feeling that maybe this isn’t possible.”

But Netflix bit on the concept, and Trussell and Ward began digging through his nearly 400 episodes of his podcast for material. Ward and the animators at Titmouse (known for Big Mouth, Metalocalypse, andThe Venture Bros.) also spent a lot of time, Trussell said, guiding him through the very different world of animation production.

“They were very compassionate with me regarding being a neophyte being brought into the Bohemian Grove,” Trussell said. In building Clancy’s distinctive universe, “I imagined I was not just making the world, but receiving the world. It was a wonderful process. It was an odd feeling to have a homesickness for a place that, I don’t even want to say it doesn’t exist.”

Ward first broached the idea of the show to Trussell in about 2013, after becoming a fan of the podcast, and then appearing on it, Trussell said. And it happened despite what Trussell said was a dopey question, asking what psychotropic drugs Ward used to create Adventure Time’s similarly out-there visuals.

“His response was, ‘None. I don’t,’” Trussell said. “I remember when he said that I thought, ‘Oh damn, I bet everyone else asks him that question,’ about what he takes to produce that beautiful, trippy art. Whereas when people ask me what (drugs) I used, I say, ‘Well, which month?’”

Though Trussell said he believes psychotropics might have benefit, especially when paired with psychotherapy, it’s also quite likely you won’t need them to become an adherent to The Midnight Gospel.