Netflix’s ‘The Midnight Gospel’ is a wacky spiritual trip
The first episode of Netflix’s “The Midnight Gospel,” the psychedelic, animated series from Cartoon Network’s “Adventure Time” creator Pendleton Ward, follows an interdimensional podcaster as he enters a computer-simulated alternate Earth.
There, he meets a boy-sized president busy fending off zombies. Looking purely at the animation, this is a drug-infused, R-rated version of “Adventure Time,” where people are torn to shreds by zombies.
The animation bears Ward’s signature charm. There’s a giant zombie who swallows the White House whole, then ambles along with the building stuck in its throat. There’s the cute, goofy avatar that the protagonist chooses as he enters his portal. If you’re watching from the kitchen with the audio low, you might guess that “The Midnight Gospel” is a strange sci-fi actionadventure featuring what might be called “cute” gore.
Certainly, “The Midnight Gospel” features striking animation, with Ward flexing his talent for visual humor on a streaming service where he doesn’t have to be concerned with parental guidelines.
The setup is that podcaster Clancy, who uses a universegenerating computer to find quirky characters to interview, enters his simulation by kneeling and crawling through a giant vagina, then shoots out, asteroidlike, from a nipple-shaped cannon. Yet the adult content here never feels crass à la “South Park”; instead it serves as a reminder that the creator of “Adventure Time” is also an adult man who thinks about sex, death and drugs.
But the most remarkable aspect of “The Midnight Gospel” isn’t the visuals. When Clancy meets the tiny president, he asks if he can interview him. Then they speak in a manner that feels less like scripted dialogue than segments from Marc Maron’s “WTF,” Pete Holmes’ “You Made It Weird” or “The Joe Rogan Experience.”
Comedian and podcaster
Duncan Trussell, host of the psychedelic/spiritual podcast “The Family Hour,” is a co-creator, executive producter and voices Clancy. Often the show feels like listening in on Trussell speaking to other spiritually minded people about sex, depression, religion, addiction and grief.
The characters in “The Midnight Gospel” don’t seem to pay too much mind to the worldending and often deadly events around them. Clancy and the president begin the “podcast” discussing the benefits of legalizing weed, then transition to the effects of psychedelics.
Clancy says he enjoys the paranoia and anxiety marijuana brings out in him because it affords an opportunity to learn about himself. The two discuss, then, the merits of the “bad trip.” They compare the experience of going up on an elevator, then seeing the door open to a party on the top floor. The party is nothing like you’ve ever seen, or known was possible to exist — but what if when the elevator goes back down it crashes two floors beneath where you started?
There are several references to Ram Das, and Eastern philosophy remains a dominant topic of conversation. As the characters talk about being Zen with death and suffering, the cartoon alternate-universe characters in the background continue to murder each other.
The characters acting indifferently and detached from the conflict and action are examples of how we should treat the conflict and action of life. But it remains a jarring experience to listen to a podcast that feels so New Age-y while, say, a giant blue dog with antlers gets ground up in a factory into meat paste.
Although “The Midnight Gospel” starts off like a gory, psychedelic experiment, the latter episodes contain surprisingly touching and mature conversations about the relationships, loss and healing. This places “The Midnight Gospel” in the great company of “BoJack Horseman,” another animated Netflix series that reveals more about our current reality than most liveaction series.
“The Midnight Gospel” is every bit an adult show, one whose tone and subject matter is closer to “Fleabag” than to “Rick and Morty.” Filled with insight and otherworldly imagery, it’s as close as a TV show can get to emulating a good psychedelic trip.