Why Welcome To Night Vale Is The Perfect Quarantine Podcast

If you’re not familiar, Welcome to Night Vale is a narrative podcast that takes the form of a community radio broadcast from the fictional town of Night Vale,

“a friendly desert community where the sun is hot, the moon is beautiful, and mysterious lights pass overhead while we all pretend to sleep.”

(( Fink, Joseph, and Jeffery Cranor. “Pilot.” Welcome to Night Vale. Night Vale Presents, June 15, 2012. ))

In the course of an episode, the radio DJ, Cecil, updates community members on daily happenings in Night Vale — from the activities of clandestine organizations to strange visits by supernatural personages to attacks by formless eldritch horrors—all with the dry but congenial tone of a public radio broadcast.

It’s been going since 2012 and has had an extremely dedicated online fandom since its inception. It’s so well known that you’ve probably already tuned into an episode or two at some point, but whether you’re a longtime fan or you’ve never heard of it, I’m here to tell you why quarantine is the perfect time to discover or revisit Welcome to Night Vale.

A Great Vastness 

Those of you who are content-starved during quarantine will be happy to hear that Welcome to Night Vale is one of the longest fiction podcasts out there. Clocking in at 170 episodes and counting plus 12 bonus episodes, 8 recorded live shows, and 3 novels available as audiobooks narrated by voice actors from the show, it’s sure to be a welcome addition to anyone’s diminishing media stockpile.

But it branches even further: towards the end of every episode, Cecil introduces a weather report. But instead of a weather report, what plays is a song from a different independent artist each time. This is a great way to discover new music, which should add even more great entertainment to your quarantine lineup. 

Haunting Loneliness

Beyond those practical concerns, however, Welcome to Night Vale also reflects what it’s like to live in quarantine. The podcast consists, for the most part, of just one voice: the famously silky tones of Cecil Baldwin playing a radio DJ who, in the world of the show, sits alone in his recording both and vigilantly reads the copy he’s handed, day in and day out. Though the podcast has had this one-voice format since 2012, the singularity of Cecil’s voice does an amazing job reflecting the loneliness of the lockdown in 2020.

This tonal feature sometimes even expands into musings on solipsism, the philosophical idea that one’s own mind is the only thing that exists. Cecil says, “And it is possible that I am alone in an empty universe, speaking to no one, unaware that the world is held aloft merely by my delusions and my smooth, sonorous voice.”(( Fink, Joseph, and Jeffery Cranor. “The Shape in Grove Park.” Welcome to Night Vale. Night Vale Presents, August 15, 2012. )) As the quarantine wears on, it’s understandable if you’re feeling a bit like that yourself, and it can be helpful to have those feelings reflected and examined in such an entertaining package as Welcome to Night Vale.

A Multifarious Municipality

Though it’s told from the perspective of one person, Welcome to Night Vale is really about the town after which it’s named. By way of reporting the news, Cecil spends each episode essentially telling stories about the everyday lives of people in Night Vale, creating a picture of a diverse, tight-knit community filled with multifaceted, complex people. 

Carlos, a gay and Latino scientist, and Cecil’s love interest, Old Woman Josie, who lives out by the Car Lot and communes with angels, and Hiram McDaniels, a literal five-headed dragon and candidate for Night Vale Mayor, are just a couple of the Night Vale residents listeners hear about. During the pandemic, it’s easy to lose sight of the communities we’re all still a part of, and listening to Night Vale can offer a healing sense of connectedness while everyone is separated. Further, as we keep up with daily events it can be tempting to view people and events in our communities as simply good or bad.

Sitting safely in his radio station, Cecil isn’t immune from this tendency either; he sometimes tells the stories of people in Night Vale with real generosity and other times he’s quick to judge and condemn, but the town’s tendency toward the supernatural always forces him to acknowledge that everyone and everything in Night Vale is more complicated than they appear from a distance. Because of this worldview, Night Vale can also provide an effective lesson in empathy during troubled times.

A Reflected Dread

Finally, in addition to reflecting the loneliness of the pandemic, Night Vale also reflects its anxiety. Many of Night Vale’s mysterious phenomena are menacing but benign: the Sheriff’s Secret Police, the Hooded Figures who lurk in the forbidden Dog Park, and the monstrous, vicious librarians who inhabit the public library are all known quantities. 

However, many episodes feature at least one visitor of possibly malicious intent (the Man in the Tan Jacket, the Traveler, the Woman From Italy), a spontaneously appearing, possibly dangerous structure (the Pyramid, the Obelisk), or a vicious attack from an inscrutable power (Street Cleaning Day, the mind-controlling Glow Cloud, or an army from the tiny city under the local bowling alley). In short, the town of Night Vale is under near-constant threat, and the resulting tension pervades the show’s tone.

On a different podcast, Welcome to Night Vale co-creator Joseph Fink talked about the origins of the show’s concept:

“I had this point where I couldn’t get out of bed, I was so anxious… I just started putting all of my anxiety into Night Vale… all of the stuff about death and about uncertainty, that’s all me just taking all the anxiety that was building up and putting it into this work instead so it didn’t have to live inside of me anymore.”

(( Fink, Joseph, and John Darneille. “Jeff Davis County Blues.” I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats. Night Vale Presents, February 7, 2018. ))

Listening to Night Vale can have a similar cathartic effect where just having one’s own anxiety reflected becomes an outlet for all that pent-up dread. 

For his part, Cecil takes most of these apocalyptic events in stride, but not just because the bigger problems tend to resolve themselves by the end of the episode or because he can’t do anything about them from his radio booth. Instead, Cecil seems to fully grasp the gravity of whatever situation he finds himself in and simply keeps his tranquil attitude anyway. At a time of so much uncertainty, his example is truly instructive.

So, if you’re looking for a new, long podcast to keep you company as the quarantine wears on, give Welcome to Night Vale a shot, and if you’re a veteran fan, try revisiting some of those old episodes. Its simultaneous treatment of loneliness and interconnectedness makes it uniquely suited for thinking through the world’s current situation, and the anxiety baked into its scenario can be cathartic if the pandemic has you feeling some of the same.