After Adventure Time ended, Ward found his primary creative outlet gone. He knew he wanted to continue making animation, but didn’t have a direction. Both of his major projects, Adventure Time and Bravest Warriors, had been conceived over a decade ago, when he was fresh out of college. Adulthood had obviously changed his perspective on the world, and he wanted to make work that reflected this.

As Ward told Animation Magazine, “I was struggling to come up with a concept for a show that could showcase the things that I think are meaningful. I wanted something overly honest that dealt with kindness and compassion, something that felt beautiful to me.”

That concept came from an unlikely source—a podcast. Actor and comedian Duncan Trussell launched The Duncan Trussell Family Hour in 2016, and in each episode he holds a freewheeling discussion with a different guest. These chats often delve pretty deep into mindfulness, meditation, and the way humans can live in the modern world, but Trussell is a gifted interviewer with a knack for keeping conversations flowing.

Ward had been a fan of the podcast for some time, and he reached out to Trussell and asked if he wanted to work together. Ward created a rough animatic around a clip from a past episode with Dr. Drew Pinsky, surrounding the conversation with a visual narrative of zombies overtaking a planet. It piqued Trussell’s interest and the pair began developing The Midnight Gospel in earnest.

The concept coalesced around a framing story about dimensional wanderer Clancy, voiced by Trussell, who uses a “universe simulator” to visit different realities and speak to their inhabitants. Those conversations are pulled from the podcast, then given fictional framings so that the people talking are portrayed as fish-headed robots, meat-eating alien hippos, and more, each one contending with the impending end of their existence. The visuals riff on, and play with, the podcast dialogue, with extra audio adding narrative context.

They took the concept to Mike Moon, head of adult animation at Netflix, who signed on immediately. The addition of animation studio Titmouse brought all of the pieces for the production together, building a team centered around creative expression and an unusual level of freedom. In each episode, the universes Clancy visits are on the verge of apocalypse, so the team had to come up with eight different ways existence could end, and then craft narratives around them.