The Complete and True Story of Trying to Make a Night Vale TV Show

We get questions regularly about what happened to the Night Vale tv show, after we announced the deal with FX years ago. And so I’ve decided, only for our patrons, to tell the complete story. This is nearly ten years of backstage drama in trying to get Night Vale on television:

Ten years ago, in the summer of 2013, Night Vale blew up. We went from 150,000 downloads our entire first year, to over 10 million downloads in just two months. And with that explosion in downloads, came many many offers to turn Night Vale into a tv show or movie.

All of those offers were straight cash offers for the rights. We pay you, and then we go away and see if we can make anything with it. I think that maybe if we had taken one of those offers, a Night Vale tv show might have existed by now. Maybe not. It probably wouldn’t have been very good, since it would have been a cash-in project we weren’t involved with.

Instead, we worked with our agent, and in fall of 2013, we met with a number of studios. Of those, Sony seemed the most excited about it, especially a man named Chris Parnell (not that Chris Parnell), who would go on to be our biggest champion in television for the next decade. Sony paired us with the writer Gennifer Hutchison, who had been working in tv since The X-Files and was currently writing on Better Call Saul. We met with her a few times, things seemed to be working out, and so we all agreed to work together.

Gennifer pitched the show all over town, while we sat quietly and watched. I had always thought that to pitch a tv show, you need a lot of specialized knowledge. Here’s a budget, here’s a shooting schedule, etc. But a tv pitch is just sitting down at a table and saying “ok, here’s what the show is” in a very general way, and they say yes or no. The yes or no usually has less to do with your pitch, and more to do with information they already have about you and whatever it is that you are pitching. Usually everything is decided before you even sit down.

In any case, FX wanted to develop the show! Which was great! (Actually, two networks wanted it, and we decided to go with FX. Another question mark is whether it would have happened if we had gone with the other network, but we’ll never know.) Gennifer wrote a pilot, and a few more drafts of that pilot, and then she left to go work on the new Lord of the Rings show. FX had mostly said yes because they were interested in working with Gennifer, and so they immediately dropped us and the option expired. Game over.

But that first attempt had been written by someone else. No one knew the world and language of Night Vale better than us. So we decided we would try one more go at television, and this time we’d write it ourselves. We made a pitch for a half hour tv version that was much closer to the tone and plot of the podcast, and Sony bought it. Once again, Chris at Sony was our biggest supporter. We were paired up with Lord and Miller, who had just produced the Spiderverse movie, and Peacock agreed to develop it for their new streaming app. It was all very exciting.

Then the pandemic hit, and everything slowed to a crawl. Emails would take months to get responses. Contracts languished for nearly a year. Finally, we started to work, and spent the next year or so writing draft after draft of a pilot. It was an incredible education in how to write for television, and the Lord/Miller team were patient and kind educators. I don’t know how many drafts we ended up writing. So many variations on the same episode.

Finally we had a version that was, I think, really good. It was a super solid half hour pilot that also FELT like Night Vale. It had that ineffable tone of the podcast, which was very hard to capture in a different medium.

Peacock said they loved it. In fact, they said they were going to greenlight it. Our production company started making a filming schedule. We had an interview with a potential showrunner (a great writer who had started as a staff writer on Buffy!) which went well, and he agreed to work with us. For the first time in years, I allowed myself to hope.

And then….

Chris, our biggest supporter, left Sony for another job. Without him there, and after all the years of pandemic turmoil, there was no one at Sony who knew who we were or what this project was. Suddenly Sony was worried that a half hour show wouldn’t make enough money. In the week before we were supposed to be greenlit, they started to ask Peacock if maybe it could be an hour instead? Peacock got weirded out. The whole deal fell apart. The sure-thing greenlight had turned into a no.

I think that’s what happened. The exact events of that last bit are still a little unclear to me. All I know is we had a tv show for sure, definitely, please set aside these months for a writers room and these months to be on set, and then we had nothing. Overnight.

It was rough. The TV business is brutal in a way that is hard to appreciate until it’s your turn to have your soul crushed.

Anyway, that’s where it ended. Sony owns our great Night Vale pilot script so we can't do anything with it, and they can't do anything with it either because the rights have reverted to us. And we’re currently working on other things, so I think, at least for the foreseeable future, the dream of a Night Vale tv show is over.

But hey, a bunch of other cool things have happened to us during that time. It’s fine. Everything’s fine.

It just would have been a really good show, that’s all.

-Joseph Fink