Welcome to Night Vale

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2012 · Commonplace Books podcast, spread on Tumblr · Also known as Night Vale; WTNV

What it is

An audio drama released free over the internet as a podcast: a series of recorded episodes that people downloaded to their phones or computers and played whenever they liked. Each episode, about twenty to thirty minutes long, pretends to be the local radio news from Night Vale, a small American desert town where every conspiracy theory is true. The host, Cecil, reports on hooded figures, a glowing cloud that sits on the school board and a dog park no one may enter, in the calm voice of someone reading traffic updates.

Where it came from

Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, two New York writers, put out the first episode in June 2012 through their small writing project Commonplace Books, with no studio or broadcaster involved. The actor Cecil Baldwin reportedly recorded early episodes on a $25 microphone Fink lent him. For a year it had a modest audience. In July 2013 it spread fast on Tumblr, a website where people reposted each other's pictures and writing, and that sharing pushed it to number one on Apple's iTunes podcast chart, above shows made by large public radio stations.

Why it mattered

It proved a cheaply made fiction podcast by two writers could find a large audience, a year before Serial made podcast listening a mainstream habit in 2014. Fans liked its deadpan mix of horror and comedy, and they liked that Cecil's romance with Carlos was treated as ordinary at a time when gay main characters were still rare in popular fiction. Its success let the creators start their own podcast network, Night Vale Presents, in 2015, and the show was still putting out episodes more than ten years after it began.

What noah thinks it shows about us

Leaving the narrator's face undescribed gave fans a job to do, and on Tumblr people happily did it for free because they enjoyed it. Their drawings worked as advertising that no one paid for, and that was enough to put a two-person show at the top of the chart.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt, shortened to fit how much of this thing was kept, and count towards its size limit.