Do you feel the magic from your lives is missing? that the normal run of the mill murder story just doesn’t cut it anymore?
Do you miss the mysterious lights in the sky and the whisper of hidden figures?
If yes then 'Welcome To Night Vale'.
One of the few podcast that holds the distinction of toppling heavyweights like 'This American Life’ for the top position in the U.S. podcast rankings, Welcome To Night Vale is a podcast filled with dark humour, supernatural phenomenons and unnatural beings embedded into stories about everyday life in a scanty little desert town called ‘Night Vale’ located in the middle of nowhere.
The stories are told through a community radio program that is broadcasted in this fiction town and narrated by the host Cecil, who is voiced by Cecil Baldwin who met the show's writers Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, through the puckish* (*playful, in a mischievous way) theatre troupe the New York Neo-Futurists, which according to a Guardian profile eventually led to anarchic themes seeping into Night Vale.
This is a refreshing show to listen to primarily because they throw open all rules of storytelling, physics, morality and science and the result is a podcast that is equal parts bizarre and liberating.
Added to all this is a segment called the Weather which has music from independent artists. It somehow fits.
Night Vale is a place where every conspiracy theory is true
The Immersive World Of Night Vale
Night Vale has a secret police, a not so secret prison that "fortunately has HBO", a dog park not meant for humans much less dogs, an annual parade of hooded figures, a glowing cloud moving over the town and an apache tracker who is actually Slavic by ethnicity but wears a native Indian headgear.
Only in Night Vale will a bowling ball accidentally veer off into a shaft that leads to a previously undiscovered underground city.
A typical Night Vale episode will have all of the above stories and still have space for some more. The episodes are richly crafted and the scope of every story pushes the imaginative boundaries of the listeners.
It's not an easy act to follow every single episode and added to all this is continuity.
"We agreed early on that we could write whatever we wanted, it could be weird and poetic, but it needed to have strict continuity," says Fink. "If we say something happened in Night Vale then it happened. Because the world needs to be believable within itself, even if it's not believable at all compared to our world,” Fink told the Guardian.
The twice-monthly show has had a successful run of eight years with over 150 episodes and counting. In this time, the top spot of the podcast ranking has been lost but the show has gained a loyal fan following which is why the franchise has also diversified to theatre plays and books, one of which has gone on to become a New York Times Bestseller.
If you like conspiracy theories with vivid descriptions and unusual humour then ‘Welcome To Night Vale’ is a podcast for you.
Check out the The Night Vale podcast below on Spotify or wherever else you get your podcast.