The Creators of “Welcome to Night Vale” Go Noir with “Unlicensed”

Note: Text has been edited and does not match audio exactly.

Christina Harcar: Hello, I'm Audible Editor Christina Harcar, and I have the pleasure today to chat with Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink, who are the creators of the genre-defining fiction podcast Welcome to Night Vale, as well as many other podcasts and products, and also are the co-creators of the Audible Original podcast Unlicensed, which we'll be talking about today. Welcome to Audible, Jeffrey and Joseph.

Jeffrey Cranor: Hi, thank you.

Joseph Fink: Great to be here.

CH: So, Unlicensed, which is a bit of a departure from Night Vale, feels a little bit like the Night Vale universe. I always feel very included in the Night Vale universe. Like, it's quirky, but everything is there for me to get. And I had that feeling also from Unlicensed. So, how intentional was it for you to make Unlicensed feel a little bit like Night Vale?

JC: I would say we weren't necessarily trying to make it feel like Night Vale insofar as the story or the characters or the exact structure of how the story is rolled out. But I would say the through line is the way Joseph and I have approached writing for fiction podcasts, which is rather than diving heavily into dialogue, we stick with more monologue, more solo storytelling. And while there are three main narrators of Unlicensed, each is given their own space, their own room to tell the story, to describe the scenes.

And I think, to me, what's similar between Welcome to Night Vale and Unlicensed is the intimacy of the relationship between the speaker and the listener. It is dramatic—they are playing parts, they're acting parts, they're doing a thing, but they are still communicating with you, the listener. And I think it's the way in which that solo storyteller can really draw a person in. For me, and I think maybe I'm speaking for Joseph too, but for me, I've always loved the solo storytelling. Sometimes dialogue feels a little exclusive, like I'm listening in on a conversation rather than being told a story. So I love diving into writing audio fiction in that manner. And I feel like Unlicensed captures that element that Welcome to Night Vale has too.

CH: Thank you for sharing that. That's totally how I felt. And I also wanted to note when I was listening to Unlicensed, at the same time, it's different than Night Vale. I felt that the stakes were higher, and that intimacy that you talked about was very present, and I got completely pulled into the world of the two main characters. So, can you talk about what was the inspiration for going from Night Vale to Noir-vale with Unlicensed?

JF: I mean, a lot of it started with the voices of the actors. All three of them are people we've worked with extensively in the past. Molly [Quinn] and Lucia [Strus] and T.L. [Thompson] all have such distinctive voices that are all so different from each other. And so it really started with, “I want something that puts these three voices together.” As Jeffrey said, it's such an intimate experience, a monologue, and a lot of that is in the voices. I think that when you get single-person storytelling, you really get something of the soul of the person in that voice. And so being able to write for people that we knew really well, that helped a lot.

Joseph Fink: "We did a number of things with the writing of the show that we had never done before."

And then I think the idea of a mystery was really interesting. A mystery set in the real world. Night Vale is not set in our world; it's set in this surreal universe. And so writing something that takes place in this world and that follows the rules of mystery writing, which is a very specific and technical way of writing, where there has to be surprises, there has to be a puzzle that's fair, that's solvable, but that also, when it's solved and all the surprises are laid out, that everyone's motivations make sense as human beings. They can't feel like robots just going through a plot. That just seemed like a really interesting challenge, and I think that’s what led us to it.

CH: Well, I think you met the challenge brilliantly. Joseph, I know that LA is your other home, so can you talk a little bit about the role that your LA played in your inspiration and in the story?

JF: I grew up in a town called Camarillo, just outside of LA, and my family lives all over the LA area, kind of from one end to the other. So I spent a lot of my childhood driving to different parts of LA, and then my adulthood now living part of the time there. And a thing I had noticed was there's just this real disconnect between the LA of stories that is very focused on Hollywood. It's very focused on silly diets for movie stars, or it's focused on the glamour and Silver Lake and hipsters. And I feel like the soul of the city is in so many other places that there's just a long and really deep history that takes place all over, outside of those realms.

We set a rule very early on that we were not allowed to set any of the story in any cool part of LA. None of the story takes place in Santa Monica. It does not take place in Hollywood or Silver Lake. None of those places were allowed to be settings. They all had to take place in locations like Northridge and Vernon and Oxnard and Riverside. I don't think we actually go to Riverside, but the idea was to just really look at the rest of LA County that gets told about much less, because I think a lot of what LA is lives in those places.

CH: Very cool. I will offer, as a humble brag, that your LA is the only LA in a story that I actually recognized places. “I have family there. I send Christmas cards there.” So I guess it worked for me. Let's talk about these main characters who drive the action, especially Molly Hatch and Lou Rosen, who are voiced by Molly Quinn and Lucia Strus. I love these characters. They spoke to me so much as women, just really good at what they do, but also hampered by personalities that they have. What was your inspiration for these characters?

JC: It definitely started with their voices. We had Lucia and Molly, the actors, in mind when we started writing the show. For those who have heard the podcast now, you can hear those distinct voices, especially Lucia has such a voice that's hard not to hear in your head as you're writing the story. Starting from that point, you kind of know how to write for those actors. That really was the inspiration. Anytime I wrote a passage for, say, Lou in the show, thinking about how Lucia's voice sounds, like it is deep, it's raspy, it's borderline unhinged, but super wise, right? There's so many elements to her and it's funny in a really dry sort of way. So, for me, writing parts for Lou, I wanted to be able to capture all of those adjectives of all of those qualities of Lucia's voice and put that in there. So the character's already sort of partially built before you even start writing character traits on the page.

JF: We did a number of things with the writing of the show that we had never done before. And one thing we did was a writers’ room. We've brought in some trusted writers who are really great—Brie Williams and Glen David Gold and Aliee Chan. And we built a lot of the show with them. And another thing we did that we'd never done before is we took all of the characters, assigned them to ourselves among the writers, and wrote detailed biographies of each of them. We never actually had done that with Night Vale or with anything we'd worked on. And that was a really interesting exercise, especially because it was all written by different people. Most of the particulars of those biographies did not end up in the show, but it just gave us some basis of when Molly is referring to difficulties back in her hometown in Nevada, we knew what the specifics of those were, even if we didn't convey all of them. And when Lou reacts strongly to the idea of fire, we knew why that was. Even though that did end up in the story, but just a lot of the stuff gets layered in. And it was an interesting exercise that we had never tried before.

CH: That richness definitely came through for me, the intimacy that you mentioned. But now I have to ask a question I didn't plan: You worked on this for two years and people you knew were the inspiration. Did you tell them you were working on this? Did you say, “I'm writing this for you”? Or did you just keep it all in and spring it on them, or how did that work?

JC: We definitely told them, because we wanted to make sure that they would do it, that they would be available once things got ramped up to getting into a production schedule. It's always fun to be able to surprise people with a fun thing like, “Hey, I wrote a story for you to perform.” But in order to maximize the chances that they'll be able to do it, you do want to give them a heads up that you're working on a thing. Or if they're like, “Yeah, I absolutely don't want to do that,” then you can find out early on. Thankfully, we didn't run into that issue, that latter issue. But yeah, you definitely want to get people on a calendar.

JF: Also, this project was a lot longer than two years. I was curious. I finally found a document that just lays out the very basics of the mystery and the title that would end up being one of the episode titles, and this document is last saved in October of 2017. So that was five years before release. There was a document that had at least a few sketches of the story in it.

CH: Well, if that isn't a great anecdote of the creative life, I don't know what is. Wow. Five years. My hat's—

JC: That's a lot.

CH: —even more off to you. Exactly. So, when I was mentioning Molly Quinn and Lucia Strus, I should have also mentioned T.L. Thompson. When you listen now, what moment is your favorite, either in terms of what it brings to the story or just how it felt for you to get it done or something that just warms your heart because you've been working on it? What brings you joy about listening to this?

JF: For me, I think every project that you go into, you have kind of an idealized version in your head when you start. You have your ideas, but you're also, when you're writing a book, you're imagining holding the hard cover and what it'll look like. You have this kind of blurry idea of this perfect version. And the truth is that almost always what you end up with is a compromise with life. You try to get as close to that perfect version as you possibly can, but you're a human being and you can only get so close. Unlicensed might be the closest we've ever come to—it was a long time of recording and editing and drafts, and some of the early drafts, I'm like, “This is good, but I have so many notes.” And then when it all started to solidify around the final mixes, there was just this moment where it clicked and I was like, “This is that thing, this is that perfect version.” It sounded as close to the perfect version I had imagined at the start as any project we've ever worked on.

Joseph Fink: "[Unlicensed] sounded as close to the perfect version I had imagined at the start as any project we've ever worked on."

JC: I had a similar path to Joseph. When we did the initial recordings with the actors—and they're doing several takes on each paragraph, basically, so it's kind of stop and start, but the first time I was listening in to Lucia's recording session and Molly's and T's, all of their recording sessions, just hearing their first passages in Episode 1, it's like chills, right? Because you wrote these things, these are the words you had in your head for these characters, these made-up fictional characters. And then here comes these three actors who perform it exactly how you were hearing it in your head. And it's validating as a writer. You say, “I think I know what this is going to sound like when somebody performs it,” and then they perform it and it sounds exactly what you thought it would be. And that makes you really proud. It makes you really happy as a writer to hear that come through. You feel right.

CH: I love compromise with life. I love that you feel that.

JC: Yes.

CH: And thank you both for sharing that, because even if I didn't have your bios on a sheet in front of me, those answers tell me, Joseph, that you are an author, and Jeffrey, you're a playwright. I love that. So, I also want to dive into all of the cameos. Unlicensed begins with a Jason Segel cameo. So, how did that happen?

JF: That was a weird one. That was during the pandemic. We just got this email from Jason Segel being like, “Hey, I like Night Vale.” It was just sort of a real generic email address and signed “Jason.” So, it wasn't even clear to me that it was the famous Jason Segel. But a lot of Jason's work was very important to me. Forgetting Sarah Marshall, I was going through a bad breakup when that came out and it was just a movie that was very helpful to me. And so I wrote a brief email back being like, “Thanks, and if you're that Jason, thank you to you as well.” And it was. So, it was really nice to be able to reach out and be like, “Hey, do you want to just come in and do this real quick thing on this new thing we're working on?”

CH: That's excellent. And then of course there were other cameos. There were a host of them, actually, from Night Vale actors. Did you plan to include those, or now that I've heard the story of how you worked on the Molly and Lou characters, I'm wondering did you just have the cast in your head and they inspired those parts?

JC: A couple of them, we might have had people in our heads. This person would do this part and this person would do this part. But I think it was more just what we've done with Night Vale for so long and other projects that we've worked on, from either podcast or even on stage, you develop a sense with what an actor can do and what they will sound like. And it's easy to work with people that you know kind of get your working style too. I've worked with outside actors before and it can be a real rollercoaster ride because some of them really want a lot of detailed notes. Some of them have a different process. When I've done Within the Wires, we have a different actor narrate each season and each year it's a total reset because a lot of them are unknown to me. So, it's a reset on the process for how these actors work.

For all of these cameo appearances, it's really nice to kind of go to the people we have worked with before because we know how they will respond. Especially for these shorter parts, we can spend less time thinking about how to shape them into the role. And they will see it, know who Joseph and I are, and be like, “Yes, I get this, we can run with it.” So, James Urbaniak, he plays Leonard Burton on Welcome to Night Vale, but he also is in Unlicensed. He has a brief clip at the beginning of an episode where he is the audio tour guide of an animal sanctuary. And there's a dryness to the humor in that bit that James perfectly captures with his voice, but also he gets it, he sees it on the page, he knows exactly what we're trying to do, and he rolls with it. And a few of them were things like taking Cecil Baldwin, the voice of Night Vale, and putting him in a role that is totally different from his character on Night Vale and just saying, “I'd love to hear how Cecil does this. I think that would be fun.” So, it kind of varies, but all in all we thought it would be easier to work with a bunch of people we knew.

JF: A funny story about the James Urbaniak one is James Urbaniak is very good friends and works with one of the Unlicensed writers, Brie Williams. They write and produce work together regularly. And Brie wrote the episode in which he performed; she wrote that part. But when our producer sent it to him, it didn't have a writer attached, it was just the part. And so he recorded it having no idea that Brie wrote it and Brie had no idea that we had cast him in that part. And so both of them were working together again, but neither had any idea until they heard the final episode.

JC: That is really funny.

CH: What was their reaction when they learned?

JC: They were tickled.

JF: I think they were happy to be working together again.

JC: Yeah, it's very funny. It was just sort of random because they're such close friends and collaborators, they have written a lot of podcasts and shows together. So it's just very funny to have somebody you are that close to, to be paired up with.

CH: That is very cool. What do you want listeners to take away from the experience of listening to your work? Especially Unlicensed, because that's what we're talking about, but you both strike me as artists who are working, on a whole, all the time. So what do you want people to leave with?

JF: A lot of it is just we hope that it's a good story well told, and that they have some of that feeling you have when you experience a good story well told. That it sticks with you for a bit, that you find yourself thinking about it over the next few weeks and discovering new feelings or thoughts about it as you go. It's always really enjoyable, especially when I read or watch something that Jeffrey or my wife, Meg, has as well. Being able to talk about it and find things that the other person found in it. Stuff like that, when you've written a story that has enough depth for that, I hope for that. I guess the other thing is, as I said, I hope that we've conveyed some different sense of what Los Angeles is like for people who haven't been there, that it's just a different narrative maybe than stories about LA that they've encountered before.

JC: Yeah, I think a good story well told is probably the best that you hope for when you make audio fiction, is that you just want somebody to come away with it liking it. I think there's a lot to talk about in the show, whether it is just having people to talk to about the characters, how they feel about the Los Angeles that's presented here. I think it's a really interesting Los Angeles in that how real it is, but also how unique it is to this story.

And like I said at the beginning, for me, podcast listening has always been about the intimacy. It's always been about the relationship I, as a listener, form with a podcast I like listening to. And you know, you hope that binging or just regularly listening to a show, somebody will really lock in on the characters, or really just feel like I want to hear more of what this voice is saying. And that's really, for me, what it boils down to. I have several podcasts I listen to where I don't actually relate that strongly to the subject matter of the podcast. It's more just I got into the podcast on a lark and then realized, “Oh, I just like hearing these people talk.” And I hope that is conveyed in Unlicensed as well.

CH: A good story well told. It's like Othello, it's a minute to learn, a lifetime to master. And this one worked. Thank you so much for that. What are you each-slash-both working on now, if you feel like sharing, if the ink is dry enough to talk about it?

JC: What are we working on right now? The two of us always have little ideas happening. There's a couple of different novels that we are in early stages on, one in particular that we are starting down the path of actually writing some chapters on and building out these new characters. And stuff like that is really fun. We're always sort of looking at other podcast ideas, too, seeing what else we have. We're hoping for the opportunity to write more toward Unlicensed, to have future seasons of this show as well because we really got to like this a whole bunch. So, nothing specific that I can give any details on.

Jeffrey Cranor: "I think a good story well told is probably the best that you hope for when you make audio fiction."

But outside of Unlicensed and Welcome to Night Vale, we have our own other little projects. I have a weekly horror movie review podcast that I do with Cecil Baldwin of Welcome to Night Vale. It's called Random Horror No. 9. I also still do Within the Wires, which is another kind of high-concept fiction podcast that's told in the form of found audio. So yeah, those are the other things. And then just trying to enjoy the beautiful New York winter as well right now.

JF: It started snowing on my run yesterday.

JC: Oh, good times.

CH: Yes. As we're recording this, I'm getting Con Ed warnings here in New York City about the storm in Buffalo and I'm like...

JC: Oh no.

CH: Okay. Yeah. Right. I did hear what you said about another Unlicensed and want to note it did not go unnoticed by me that after a very satisfying conclusion there was a twist, with no spoiler alerts, that could open the door.

JF: I do think that ending would work as an ending if that's all we get to write. Because there is a certain noir tradition of endings that aren't exactly perfect for everyone, that that sometimes is just the ending. But I do think we wanted to leave open for more story, because we are definitely eager to keep seeing what happens with these characters.

JC: It's such a delicate balance, because I have watched TV series that the last episode of a season ends where the whole Season 1 storyline is not resolved. And you think, well, now you're just breaking up Season 1 and calling it Season 1 and 2 and I have to wait a year for that. And we didn't want to do that with Unlicensed. We wanted the story of these 12 episodes to conclude. But as Joseph said, in mystery, it's not always fully, perfectly resolved. You want to leave some room for an opening some other place. You don't want it to be happily ever after and these people all just went on with their lives and everything's great.

CH: Well, as someone who got totally hooked by Unlicensed in the first episode and kind of binged all the rest of it, thank you for not orphaning me. Thank you.

JC: Yeah, makes me crazy.

CH: That would not be good. Thanks for your time today. I'm definitely going to go check out your horror film podcast because horror scares me but I like to keep up. So, thank you, and enjoy the storm.

JC: Oh, we will. Thank you.

JF: Yeah, thank you so much.

CH: And listeners, you can get Unlicensed on Audible now.