Netflix released all eight episodes of The Midnight Gospel on April 20, 2020. The animated series comes from Pendleton Ward, the creator behind Adventure Time, and Duncan Trussell, host of The Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast. It ran for a single season before Trussell announced in June 2022 that Netflix had cancelled it.
Trailer, via Netflix.
Clancy Gilroy and the Chromatic Ribbon
The show follows Clancy Gilroy, a spacecaster voiced by Trussell. Clancy lives on the Chromatic Ribbon, a membranous, tape-like planet floating in a colorful void. Simulation farmers there use bio-organic computers to simulate universes, harvesting natural resources and new technology from them. Clancy owns an unlicensed multiverse simulator and travels through bizarre worlds on the brink of disaster, interviewing their residents for his spacecast.
Real Podcast Audio, Surreal Animation
The trick that makes The Midnight Gospel work: the interviews are real. The audio is sampled from earlier episodes of Trussell’s podcast, and the animation builds surrealistic adventures around that raw conversation. Stories unfold through the environment and extra voice work by Trussell and his guests, running alongside the podcast audio rather than replacing it.
The guest list is long and strange:
- Phil Hendrie as the Universe Simulator
- Stephen Root
- Drew Pinsky
- Damien Echols
- Trudy Goodman
- Jason Louv
- Caitlin Doughty
- Michael Marcanio
- Maria Bamford
- Joey Diaz
- David Nichtern
- Deneen Fendig
Apocalypse at the End of Every Episode
Each episode sends Clancy through planets inside the simulator, with the beings who live there as his interview subjects. The conversations turn on existential questions about life, death and everything in between. Episodes typically close with an apocalyptic event that Clancy barely escapes. That structure gives the season its shape: a talk about dying, staged inside a world that is dying.
What the Format Actually Does
The Midnight Gospel is not a talk show with pictures laid over it. The podcast audio carries the ideas; the animation carries the plot. Ward and Trussell let the two run on separate tracks, so a guest can be discussing grief while the screen shows a world coming apart. The mismatch is the point, and it is the reason the series holds up as more than a curiosity.
Release Schedule
| Episode | Release date | Season |
|---|---|---|
| 1–8 | April 20, 2020 | 1 |
All eight episodes arrived on the same day. There was no weekly rollout, no second season to follow.
Why Eight Episodes Are Enough
The Midnight Gospel earns its 8.2 out of 10. The season is short and its method is narrow, but the method is genuinely new. Sampling real interviews into animated disaster stories could have been a gimmick; instead it produces something the podcast alone could not, because the worlds give the talk a body. The cancellation after one season leaves the experiment unfinished, and that is the real loss here. What exists is eight episodes that treat death, drugs and meditation as subjects worth animating rather than merely discussing.
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