Director's Notes: 208 - Cecil in The Big City (Patreon)

When Joseph and I write the podcast scripts, we tend to do so on our own. There’s communication, of course, about what we’re writing. Sometimes we chat back and forth to try to refine some ideas. What do you think of this? What if we did that? And then we go off separately to write the episode drafts.

When we’re done editing, we send the script to Cecil & he records at his home studio. Cecil’s usually not involved in the story-writing process. But every now and then he’ll chime in with a thought, and it’s almost always pretty great.

A couple years ago, Cecil told me he wanted a scary episode. We hadn’t had a straightforward spooky Night Vale episode in a while, and I thought “huh! You’re right.” So I sat down to write Ep 171: Go to the Mirror? Which is my attempt at straight up creep-fest.

Fast forward to a couple of months ago, Cecil and I are recording our other show (Random Horror 9) and he says “I want a Cecil and Carlos in the Big City episode.” I laughed because it’s such a classic sitcom trope. I told him I’d see what I could do, but I didn’t really know what that would be.

At the time, I was trying to figure out how to wrap up the Khoshekh/Silas storyline. I got kind of stuck on where Silas and Mino would have gone off to, and of course, they would have gone to a museum. And a museum would likely be in The Big City. Obviously.

I didn’t realize how fun it would be to play around with The Big City trope as a Night Vale device. The clothes-shopping, the tourist tchotchkes, the musicals. All that.

The last few years, I’ve been pushing myself to try different ways to structure Night Vale episodes: single narration; third-person POV; vague/leading creepiness. It’s a challenge not to fall back on the classic Night Vale structure of Main Story, local news interspersed, weather, resolution. But you know what? Sometimes things are classic because they work. They’re classic because they look and sound nice.

And I think that was the case with this episode. Hope it’s as enjoyable to listen to as it was to write.

-Jeffrey Cranor
May 15, 2022