playnext.fm

Midnight Burger · Business Goose Media

Patreon Drop!... Audio Drama School 1: What is This Thing?

October 7, 2025·37 min·2 clips
Joe opens with a 45,000-year-old pig painting in a South Pacific cave and asks what the first artist was thinking the moment they stepped back from the cave wall.
The doorway is practical. Midnight Burger stays free, but Joe is blunt that the show still costs money to make. A promo passes through, then he moves from support links and season logistics into a Patreon preview. The lesson turns personal quickly. Joe remembers making audio drama during the pandemic and finding a form that felt different from his earlier work. The plan was temporary. When the pandemic kept going, that loose creative charge needed somewhere to land, so he called everyone again. Midnight Burger started as something expandable, flexible, and open-ended enough to keep going until the team got tired. Instead, it brought him back to life creatively. He talks through writing, sending drafts to Finley, recording with the cast, and remembering what writing could feel like. Then listeners found it. The show began moving through audio drama spaces, and the private experiment became public. The Guardian list hit hard, naming Midnight Burger among 20 essential independently produced podcasts, alongside the Siltverses as fiction company. That changed the question. Joe stopped treating the project like a side thing and started wondering what would happen if he gave himself to it. By the end, the Patreon lecture feels like a room for process, homework, questions, and learning out loud.

As heard by us

A candid origin story about two half-hour experiments growing into an independent fiction show.

Joe frames Midnight Burger as a story about a show finding its shape while it is being made. He starts with two half-hour experiments, then traces how the project kept opening up as the writing and audience response gave it room to grow.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Press play if you want the messy, human origin story behind Midnight Burger.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →
Listen to the show on
Apple PodcastsSpotify
Play clips from this episodeMore from Midnight Burger