The Midnight Gospel: Will There Be A Season 2?
Comedian Duncan Trussell and "Adventure Time" co-creator Pendleton Ward created something human and beautiful when they made their Netflix series "The Midnight Gospel." The animated show premiered in April 2020 and audiences fiercely connected with it during the beginning of the pandemic. So, will there be a season 2?
So far, Netflix has yet to renew "The Midnight Gospel" for season 2. However, the show isn't entirely canceled, so there is still hope yet for the show to return in all its cosmic glory. Two months after its debut, creator Trussell opened up about season 2 during an interview with Deadline:
"Obviously, there's a writhing part of me that is deeply in suspense, waiting for a decision to be made, one way or the other, and if I said that wasn't there, everybody would know I was a horrible liar," he said in June 2020. "But that being said, they let us make this crazy thing! To me, it's just the wildest thing to imagine that any network would let me and Pendleton roll with this wild idea—and now, it's living on Netflix forever.
"That's glorious. But if you have any kind of magical powers, or even better, some connection to Netflix, give us a second season!" he added. "Please, I want to make more. There's so many more stories to tell about The Chromatic Ribbon. You know, we mapped out that world, and we barely, barely got into that world. But nothing you're seeing in that show — not a single word, not a single moment — was unintentional. It all connects to a really big history, and a very deep story."
We Really Need a Second Season
Personally, I'm dying for this show to make an encore appearance. The show is an alchemical mix of comedy and profound consciousness packed into a psychedelic, cerebral, and spacey animated package. The way the dialogue and the visuals clash every episode is a powerful tactic and it makes the emotional moments hit that much harder.
Take, for example, the season 1 finale, which deals with Trussell's mother's passing. The audio track is from a podcast he recorded with his mother just weeks before her death. After the animators got their hands on the episode, which was free from Trussell's creative hand, he was "astounded" by the honorable and emotional treatment his mother was given:
"Somehow, these animators had captured my mom's spirit in it, just from her voice. It's one of the most astounding things, and it really shines a light on how powerful the medium of animation is, in the sense that, that is my mom," he told Deadline. "The whole time I spent working on 'Midnight Gospel,' I was gradually realizing what an incredible medium animation was. But that hit it home, when I realized that there's a resurrective quality to it that I don't think exists in any other form I'm aware of."
Duncan Trussell Has Addressed Midnight Gospel Season 2 More Than Once
In August 2020, Trussell spoke with Inverse and claimed the streaming giant was thrilled with the series' initial audience — which seemed to make it a shoe-in for a renewal:
"[Netflix is] super excited about the reception it's getting. Midnight Gospel is... I don't think it's like any other show. And, you know, Netflix is Netflix. They're like, 'We don't know about Season 2 yet either way,' and they're masters of not indicating anything one way or the other," he said during the interview. "And I get it because if they kind of hint to you that there's gonna be another season, then that's gonna trigger a whole bunch of sh*t. But then, on the other hand, they indicate that maybe they're not. They're just really good at maintaining a kind of neutrality regarding it.
"But there's so much more in that world, and we just barely scratched the surface of it, so I would love to make a million more episodes of Midnight Gospel because we only covered the very, very basic world, and we didn't really get into some of the other stuff that's going on in the Ribbon, which to me is really, really exciting. I just really want to tell that story.
We all want Trussell, with Ward's help, to continue telling stories — I think that much is clear. In fact, there's even a Change.org petition to renew "The Midnight Gospel," that has just under 3,000 signatures. Okay, so it's not massive yet, but that number isn't to be overlooked. There's a real audience for this sleeper hit and the more people see it, the more they rave about it. See: every person I've ever told to watch it.