Picture: Netflix
If you can believe it, it’s been three years since Netflix’s ambitious, niche, and critically acclaimed adult animated series The Midnight Gospel was officially announced to be canceled after only a single season. While the podcast lives on, the Netflix show is still highly regarded and if you wondered what season 2 might’ve looked like, we just got a new “leak” showing just that…
The news comes through the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast, or more specifically, the live stream version of the podcast, given that the clip didn’t feature in the pre-recorded version of the podcast. However, much of the commentary still remains.
Duncan Trussell starts the solo podcast, teasing that The Midnight Gospel would feature towards the end, but was mysterious about what exactly would be shown. When the end of the podcast does roll around, he starts clearing up a question he always gets: Is there going to be a second season? The answer is still no, and he wants to make sure people don’t get their hopes up. “We’re not doing another season,” he says bluntly. “Just want to eradicate any hope you might have there.” But instead of venting frustration, Duncan focuses on what he calls the “miraculous” fact that the show even got made at all before showcasing a brand new mockup trailer.
“You have to understand how insane it was that Netflix let us make that show,” he says. “That show never should have gotten made,” Duncan emphasizes how unusual it was for Netflix to support something so weird, philosophical, and non-traditional. Even more shocking was that the animation happened entirely in the U.S., a rarity in an industry where work is usually outsourced to cheaper studios abroad. “The animators were all at Titmouse, an in-house animation team,” Duncan explains.
He admits he never looked at the budget because he didn’t want financial concerns to affect the creative process. “I could have looked at the budget… but I never looked because I didn’t want that to impact me feeling free to come up with ideas with Pendleton [Ward].” Still, he has no illusions about the cost: “It must have been fucking expensive. It had to have been.”
So why didn’t Netflix renew it? According to Duncan, it’s simple: the numbers weren’t there. “It’s a business,” he says. “They’re trying to make money. There’s probably a crystal clear set of numbers that justify paying more money for another season. And The Midnight Gospel did not get that initially.” The show didn’t generate the kind of fast, bingeable engagement Netflix looks for, especially not the kind that justifies a second season of such an expensive project.
Duncan calls the show “a boutiquey, artsy, philosophical crazy show,” and notes it’s not exactly Stranger Things. “It deals with some heavy duty fucking shit,” he says. “I could see how someone who wasn’t into that stuff… would not stick around with that show.” Ultimately, he recognizes that the show wasn’t built for mass appeal, and that’s okay. “That’s just how it works,” he says.
After reflecting on this, Duncan surprises viewers of the live stream with a wild and heartfelt reveal: he secretly made a trailer for what a second season could have looked like and put together said trailer with some collaborators from season 1.
Among those collaborators? None other than Jesse Moynihan, one of the main animators from the original show, and American rapper Lil Yachty, who voiced a character in the trailer named Daniel Hoops, in addition to cameos from comedians Ron White and Ian Fidance.
So why make the trailer at all? Duncan says it simply: “I realized it’s kind of sad to not share it with people. Like, what am I doing?” And with that, he shares the trailer live on the podcast’s video stream. A glimpse into what could have been.
That season 2 clip is not in the podcast we’ve embedded above.
At the end of the podcast, Duncan jokingly pleads with the live stream viewers not to leak the secret trailer, saying, “Definitely nobody, if anybody was like recording this, don’t, don’t share that. That’d be horrible.” He threatens leakers with escalating and severe punishments: “If you leak, it’ll be a 10-minute ban when you come back—minimum… maybe a 15-minuter. We’ve never done a 15-minuter.” Concluding, he adds, “I know how the internet works, which is that if you ask people not to leak something, they won’t.”
This is where we come to the fact that, yes, someone did leak the video. A YouTube channel aptly named Daniel Hoops, who will undoubtedly be the recipient of a 10-minute ban or worse, posted the full 5-minute secret trailer:
Picture: Duncan Trussell Family Hour
Picture: Duncan Trussell Family Hour
Picture: Duncan Trussell Family Hour
Are you still disappointed that The Midnight Gospel won’t be returning for a second season at Netflix? Let us know in the comments.
