Critical Review: Welcome to Night Vale

Welcome to Night Vale is a podcast that was spawned from the minds of Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor in the hallowed year of 2012. The podcast mimics the style of a radio show with the main character and narrator Cecil delivering the daily events of an extremely strange town titularly named Night Vale. The story of the town is often surreal and absurd. Angels can be found behind the KFC, and mysterious hooded figures rule from the shadows of a pizza parlor. Cecil delivers all of this straight, creating both humor from the humdrum day to day of the town colliding with the supernatural, as well as horror from the lack of power the citizens have in their given situations. 

Night Vale’s audience is likely aimed at young to older adults savvy with podcast technology, which has become remarkably more accessible in the modern day, as well as horror genre conventions and conspiracy theories. The humor is dark, but not overbearingly so. An example of this is seen in episode 3 when Cecil reports that Chad, the intern, has been killed while buying a tennis racket from a sporting goods store that is secretly a front for the World Government. We expect, because of the horror genre, that Cecil be shocked and horrified by the death of his intern, but instead he merely gives his condolences to Chad’s parents, saying that, “To the parents of Chad, the intern: we regret to inform you that your son was lost in the line of community radio duty, and that he will be missed and never forgotten. May you all feel blessed to have the family that you have, and if you’re looking for sporting goods, check out Play Ball right over by our own Night Vale community radio station!” (7:05-7:23). This dry relation of a tribute to a dead colleague is furthered by Chad’s status: he’s an intern, and therefore expendable. While this humor is dark and laced with murder, it ultimately relates to a feeling of expendability that the audience members have likely felt or witnessed within their own workplaces. The humor here is also related to work, a sphere of adults, and while teens can likely still engage meaningfully with the podcast I believe that the text itself is much more geared towards young and older adults. 

Night Vale has been hugely successful. Its audience has exploded since its conception, with it reaching over 150,000 downloads a month in 2013. To analyze whether this popularity has been due to its status as a Digital Networked Narrative, we might turn to Alexander’s themes (serial structure, personal presence, social framework, and multiple proscenia) to guide our investigation.

Welcome to Night Vale operates under a serial structure, with each episode presenting a contained story inside of a larger overarching narrative. Personal presence is distinctly felt as the audience is invited to envision themselves as an inhabitant or voyeur of Night Vale within its strange universe. In terms of multiple proscenia the podcast is definitely accessible on multiple platforms (spotify, youtube, stitcher). However, a large part of Welcome to Night Vale’s success I believe has come from its social framework. In 2013, Aja Romano of the Daily Dot published an article that highlighted how fans of the show were making fan-transcripts of the episodes in order to make the show more accessible to viewers who couldn’t or simply weren’t used to listening to stories. I’ll leave article’s link here: 

https://www.dailydot.com/parsec/fandom/welcome-night-vale-podcast-fan-transcripts-fanscripts/

Sure enough, these fan-trascripts are still being updated. The tumblr blog “cecilspeaks” has made transcripts up to episode 152, including the various live shows that the producers have uploaded. Here’s a link to that particular blog if you’d like to check it out:

https://cecilspeaks.tumblr.com/

Night Vale also has a popular twitter, but I think I’ve gone on for so long there’s not much point jumping into that. The point is, the podcast has benefitted from the social framework surrounding it, and continues to do so today.