Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
The first thing you notice about The Midnight Gospel is its animation. Colorful, flexible, buoyant, and yet deeply vulgar at times, Pendleton Ward’s newest show delivers on its promise of being akin to Adventure Time, but more adult. And yes, Midnight Gospel is being released on 4/20, meaning you’d expect it’s good for celebrating a certain holiday — and it is. But The Midnight Gospel isn’t just another trippy series that’s fun to watch with drugs… It’s also a deeply introspective, vulnerable, and shockingly honest exploration of what it means to find inner peace.
Created by Pendleton Ward and Duncan Trussell and animated by Titmouse, The Midnight Gospel follows the day-to-day interviews of an intergalactic podcaster named Clancy (voiced by Trussell). Each episode Clancy picks a new universe from his malfunctioning multiverse simulator and stumbles along before finding someone new and interesting to interview. Much like Adventure Time, there are so many weird details in Midnight Gospel that it’s almost impossible to process the madness. Clown babies are eaten one minute before a meat monster starts singing the next. But much like the Cartoon Network show, the how never particularly matters. What matters is the why of the universe.
Between spell-binding animation sequences, Clancy and his guest talk about vague concepts like the point of mind-altering drugs and finding strength in their own mortality. Taken on their own these conversations would seem like little more than typical stoner fare. But paired with the odd yet ever-deliberate animation of this series, these musings become something more beautiful.
As Clancy talks to the sunglasses-waring President (voiced by Dr. Drew Pinsky) about whether there’s such a thing as a “good” or “bad” drug, they have to battle zombies. In the episode’s final moments they’re turned into their undead foe, that bite revealing to them that the toxic injection they were so afraid of is actually a gateway to a happier state of being. In a later episode when a chicken-snake-man version of Clancy talks to Annie the deer dog (voiced Anne LaMott) about the power that comes in accepting death, they do so while being ground into meat. Both moments perfectly mirror their conversations, transforming their observations into a more powerful statements about the world we live in. It’s next to impossible to see the zombie bite and later the zombie vaccine as little more than a misunderstood drug. And there’s something deeply powerful and cathartic watching two people continuing to discuss the inevitability of death while their bodies are being pulverized into edible slime.
The greatest examples of animation often take the nebulous, tricky emotions and stressors of being human and condense them to easily digestible but always understandable stories. Adventure Time did that with the concept of friendship. And now The Midnight Gospel is here to hold all of our hands as we attempt the difficult journey of introspection and self-acceptance.
