Few animated series ask as much of a viewer's attention as The Midnight Gospel, a 2020 American production from Pendleton Ward and Duncan Trussell that sets long, searching conversations about life and death against some of the strangest scenery animation has to offer.
What is The Midnight Gospel about?
Clancy is a spacecaster. He owns a universe simulator, a machine that lets him pick a world, step inside it and wander around until he finds someone worth talking to. Whatever creature he meets becomes the guest of his next broadcast, and the interview keeps going while the world around the two of them does whatever it was already doing. The places he visits are loud, colourful and thoroughly trippy; the talk is quiet and curious, circling the biggest questions a person can ask: what it means to be alive, how to face death, and how to handle everything that falls between those two points. Every episode opens a new world and a new conversation, so the series can be watched one chapter at a time.
About the cast
Duncan Trussell and Phil Hendrie are the voices credited at the top of the cast. Trussell's name also appears next to Pendleton Ward's in the directing credits, which makes him one of the people shaping the series from both sides of the microphone. Because so much of each episode is conversation, the voice work carries an unusual share of the weight.
Context & significance
The Midnight Gospel is filed under five genres at once: adventure, animation, comedy, fantasy and science fiction. That list is a fair description of how it behaves. The simulator premise is science fiction, the worlds Clancy lands in belong to fantasy, the journeys through them are adventure, and the jokes arrive in the middle of subjects most comedies avoid. Episodes run about 23 minutes each, a compact length for material this dense. The series was produced in the United States and has been warmly received by audiences, standing among the more admired animated titles of its year.
Watching The Midnight Gospel on Ktime
The Midnight Gospel is available on K-Time with both a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so you can follow the conversations in whichever form is more comfortable. Reading this page is open to everyone; playing the episodes requires logging in to a K-Time account. The service is built for Persian speakers abroad, with a full Farsi interface.