I want to preach you the gospel of Midst. It's a new science-fantasy audio drama, I have nothing to do with it, I just love it.
Its world is wholly unpredictable, but coherent.
Midst takes place in a kitchen-sink fictional universe, like Firefly or Welcome to Night Vale or the comic book series Saga. (If you like Saga, you will 100% like this show.) Midst has a little steampunk, a little D&D, a little western. Even a bit of N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth series.
It’s a complex and thought-out world. There’s a church that runs on social currency, or moral currency, and it feels weird and fantastical but also reads as a satire of the concept of money. There’s something called the Fold that causes anomalies, real bad anomalies if you’re not careful, and there are certain lights that avoid those anomalies. And those certain lights happen to be real cool.
Through these complex and slowly revealed phenomena (more quickly revealed if you read the supplemental materials), the show earns all sorts of fun and crazy details. Like, because they’ve built their world so well, it gets to be weird without you feeling that any old thing could happen. Everything weird, you understand, is weird for a good reason.
Our main characters are a monster hunter who lives in a shack on the frontier; a nightclub owner wheeling and dealing like Al Swearingen; and a sort of knight templar in service to a powerful church.
It’s funny but it’s not a comedy.
A lot like Saga or Firefly or Night Vale. It has a good sense of humor, but no feeling of parody. The world doesn’t exist to deliver jokes. Contrast with Hitchhiker’s Guide and early Discworld.
There are a lot of audio dramas with no sense of humor. I’m not sure if their writers consciously think that if you’re not a comedy, you can never be funny. Which of course isn’t true, most great dramas are occasionally funny. You know what has a lot of funny moments? Schindler’s List. I’m serious! Midst is not at all like Schindler’s List. But it is occasionally funny, and never unfunny.
It’s told by three narrators, at once.
Now this is nuts, I’ve never heard anything like this. Three narrators, who so far are not part of the action, who flow back and forth. Which (along with pristine delivery) makes it feel like improvised storytelling. But it is clearly meticulously scripted. (Maybe they riffed a few lines. I have a bet going with my co-writer Tim.)
One weird thing, all three narrators occasionally slip into a very particular—cadence, pausing at—non-obvious—moments, like podcaster and YouTuber Mike Rugnetta. Bit of an affectation when three people are doing it.
Since everything is narrated, the show can throw tons of settings and characters and set dressing and costuming at you, and you (I) can actually keep track of it. Some “audio dramas” lazily spell out action lines like a script. Midst describes things with energy and detail, like a novel. The narration and the sound design are complementary, never redundant. There’s not this familiar feeling:
No, there’s the opposite feeling with Midst. In episode two there’s one recurring sound effect that ratchets up the tension of the scene. Strong use of the medium. Reminds me of Vince Gilligan.
All the dialog is act-outs. Like, we don’t cut to the scene. The narrators “do the voices,” and get this, any narrator can do any of the voices. You’ll hear different narrators take turns with the same character in the same scene. Which obviously sounds like it doesn’t work. It sounds so much like it so wouldn’t work, that it feels like a flex. Because—so far—it works. I mean, one of the narrators is way better at playing marble-white nightclub owner Moc Weepe than the others, but it’s nice that everyone gets a try. And they’ve worked to give every character a distinct speech pattern, so you know which character is talking no matter which narrator’s mouth it comes from. Carefully planned, like every part of this show.
New episodes come out on Fridays. Go listen.
My next issue won’t be unpaid sponcon for someone else’s show. Probably.
Question about audio drama? Reply to this email, and only I will see it.