'The Midnight Gospel' Is 'Adventure Time' for Messed-Up Adults

When Adventure Time premiered in 2010, nobody at Cartoon Network really knew what they had on their hands. Ward had originally introduced the characters in a short film he produced almost entirely by himself after graduating from Cal Arts in 2006. Animation studio Frederator pitched it to Nickelodeon twice, but the show eventually found a berth at Cartoon Network.

Executives were concerned about Ward’s inexperience, so the production brought in a murderer’s row of experienced hands, including SpongeBob SquarePants alum Merriwether Williams. Together, they crafted a show that was perfectly tuned to the modern world. Not explicitly gendered, endlessly creative, and full of memeable characters, Adventure Time quickly became a critical and commercial success.

Ward eventually stepped down as showrunner, saying the process was much too stressful. He continued to contribute story ideas and serve as an executive producer, but the team he’d put together was more than capable of keeping the ship sailing. 

As the show continued, the emotional depth and complexity increased. A throwaway joke early on—that the Land of Ooo was actually post-apocalyptic Earth—began to inform storylines. Backstories were fleshed out for characters like the Ice King. Eventually, the show became an all-ages meditations on very adult topics, like memory, loneliness, and loss.

After 10 seasons, production wrapped in 2018, but the franchise isn’t finished. Four hour-long specials are slated to premiere this year on HBO Max, but the long journey of Jake and Finn is pretty much over.

After Adventure Time ended, Ward found his primary creative outlet gone. He knew he wanted to continue making animation, but didn’t have a direction. Both of his major projects, Adventure Time and Bravest Warriors, had been conceived over a decade ago, when he was fresh out of college. Adulthood had obviously changed his perspective on the world, and he wanted to make work that reflected this.

As Ward told Animation Magazine, “I was struggling to come up with a concept for a show that could showcase the things that I think are meaningful. I wanted something overly honest that dealt with kindness and compassion, something that felt beautiful to me.”

That concept came from an unlikely source—a podcast. Actor and comedian Duncan Trussell launched The Duncan Trussell Family Hour in 2016, and in each episode he holds a freewheeling discussion with a different guest. These chats often delve pretty deep into mindfulness, meditation, and the way humans can live in the modern world, but Trussell is a gifted interviewer with a knack for keeping conversations flowing.

Ward had been a fan of the podcast for some time, and he reached out to Trussell and asked if he wanted to work together. Ward created a rough animatic around a clip from a past episode with Dr. Drew Pinsky, surrounding the conversation with a visual narrative of zombies overtaking a planet. It piqued Trussell’s interest and the pair began developing The Midnight Gospel in earnest.

The concept coalesced around a framing story about dimensional wanderer Clancy, voiced by Trussell, who uses a “universe simulator” to visit different realities and speak to their inhabitants. Those conversations are pulled from the podcast, then given fictional framings so that the people talking are portrayed as fish-headed robots, meat-eating alien hippos, and more, each one contending with the impending end of their existence. The visuals riff on, and play with, the podcast dialogue, with extra audio adding narrative context.

They took the concept to Mike Moon, head of adult animation at Netflix, who signed on immediately. The addition of animation studio Titmouse brought all of the pieces for the production together, building a team centered around creative expression and an unusual level of freedom. In each episode, the universes Clancy visits are on the verge of apocalypse, so the team had to come up with eight different ways existence could end, and then craft narratives around them.

I talked with Damien Blaise, who helped storyboard several episodes of The Midnight Gospel. He described a collaborative experience where artists were given a long leash for how the show’s wild visuals came together.

“Pendleton sort of gave loose concepts and character ideas to specific board people and gave a lot of freedom in the beginning to write / come up with the visual events of the stories, because in animation the storyboarders are basically the writers and cinematographers at the same time.”

Of the creative process, Blaise commented that it was “like a free psychedelic stream of consciousness of events and gags based on the concepts in that first pass. They didn’t have to be connected to the audio in any way. Then they would meet and present to the rest of the animation team.”

Eventually, the audio from the podcasts were introduced into the animation. According to Blaise, “there was the next pass of merging the podcast audio with the events, so intros and new lines were written for the guests to come record to tie it all back together. It was a really awesome holistic process approach that allows for more quality and creativity overall!”

This unconventional approach of The Midnight Gospel led to a show that’s less overtly narrative-driven than Adventure Time, allowing the visuals to do the heavy lifting while the audio explores the themes. It’s a fascinating concept that hearkens back to shows like Dr. Katz, which used stand-up comedy as base material for its fictional psychiatrist’s visits, but The Midnight Gospel goes way farther, with enough budget to bring numerous impressive set pieces to life.

In his interview with Animation, Ward said that he had a tough time adjusting to making work that wasn’t explicitly for kids. “I don’t know … I was like ‘this feels wrong!’ But then I got over it!," he related. "My intention was to mix cartoony ultra-violence with conversations on compassion. I wanted to make something that calloused people could bite into and maybe get something out of it.”

That deeper meaning is a huge part of what makes The Midnight Gospel special. This is a show that’s really trying to push its viewers to wrestle with the nature of their beings even as it dazzles them with wacky sci-fi adventures.

Without the pressure of maintaining a franchise intended for all ages, The Midnight Gospel can push the envelope for animation, bringing the subtext of Adventure Time to the foreground, right in time for kids who grew up watching Finn and Jake to go through their own quarantine-induced crises. It’s the next logical step for a creator who punches way above his weight class, and we can’t wait to see more.

The Midnight Gospel premieres on Netflix on April 20.

Done with The Midnight Gospel? Fans of fantasy, sci-fi, and superheroes have plenty to choose from on Netflix.