Welcome to Night Vale’s Joseph Fink and Molly Quinn on ‘Unlicensed’: Season 3
Our favorite detectives have spent the 20th century solving cunning murders and investigating nefarious underworlds of scum and thievery. Cute stuff. But can an odd-couple pair of detectives solve the uncrackable case of L.A.’s housing crisis? That’s the question behind the latest season of Unlicensed, the mystery audiodrama from Welcome to Night Vale’s Joseph Fink. Starring Molly Quinn (The Life of Chuck) and Lusia Strus (Paint), Unlicensed follows a duo of gumshoes taking on unassuming cases that get them entangled in webs of malfeasance.
New Season, New Mysteries
This latest season, now available on Audible, sees detectives Molly Hatch and Lou Rosen investigating a community of tiny home villagers displaced by an earthquake that destroyed their dingbat apartments. Like great detective fiction before it, Unlicensed is ostensibly a pulp mystery but functionally a probing of real corruption. In this case, Season 3 takes a magnifying glass to the conspiring forces that keep cities unaffordable and deprive working people of housing.
“In Season 3, we’ve come so far, we’ve already been through so much, and now we’re facing our worst threat yet because we can’t even see it. We’re caught unaware by the spider web of evil that is underneath these things that we’re scratching at the surface,” says Molly Quinn, who’s returned to voice her role of Molly Hatch (another mystery is keeping track of the Mollies). “So I would say that you find [Molly & Lou] in a state of optimism, maybe thinking that things are evening out a little bit, and unfortunately, they’re proven wrong.”
Sadly Relevant in 2025
The season was written well before the Palisades fires earlier this year, but it’s impossible not to think about them as the show chronicles the plight of displayed Angelenos. “We wanted to start with The Eagle Rock tiny ome illage, which is a very real place. That’s kind of right by my house,” Fink explains, tracing his motivation to make the housing crisis his narrative entry point for the third season. “So it was a world I knew very well, but also, it’s such a central issue everywhere. Especially in LA, a place that just has not built nearly enough housing, and then just recently lost thousands and thousands of homes… after the fires. It’s brutal.”
And like great mysteries before it, the series is entrenched in the world of Los Angeles itself: its geography, its mythology, the institutions that run it, and the residents who get steamrolled. A resident of Eagle Rock, Unlicensed is something of a love letter from Fink to LA’s undersung areas. It shows a different side to the city than the glamorous, Hollywood-centric one we often see.
“Part of the fun of Unlicensed for us is highlighting parts of Los Angeles that get written about less. We had a rule of ‘no cool places.’ We didn’t want to set scenes in Hollywood, in Beverly Hills, in Santa Monica,” Fink explained. “We wanted to set it in places of LA County that just don’t get portrayed much in the media.”
As someone who spent their share of Friday nights at the Vidiots Theater in Eagle Rock, I finally recognized the Los Angeles that I knew and loved.
A Serial, Noir Mystery
As opposed to the surrealist Welcome to Night Vale, the world of Unlicensed is defined by sociopolitical details characteristic of our reality. Tiny houses, homeowners’ associations, and NIMBYism. That’s a word that rivals any grand horror which fantasy could conjure up.
On Unlicensed’s topical themes, Quinn says, “[The show’s] about human nature and how we perceive things as good or fine on the outside. And if you take the time to scratch at it, you know, you see, you see what’s underneath. Lou and Molly are people who can’t stop scratching.”
In another contrast to the more episodic nature of Welcome to Night Vale, Unlicensed is a serialized narrative with an intricate mystery that builds on itself over the course of the season, which is why Joseph worked with a writers’ room.
“When you write a twelve-episode mystery, then you owe it to your audience to try to make that mystery complex and fair. These are things that are really hard to do without a team of writers. You need someone in the room to be like, ‘Hey, I was looking at this, and actually, I don’t think this makes sense.’ You need that many eyes looking at it.”
Tackling The First-Person Narration
Another element that’s quintessential to the noir atmosphere is that the story of Unlicensed unfolds through first-person narration between our dual protagonists. It’s a narrative choice that stands out from other audio dramas, but it also harkens back to the first-person perspective writing of mystery writers like Raymond Chandler.
“We really, really like the monologue. We really like the things you can do with shifting from storytelling to a direct experience to moments of dialogue, like we do in Unlicensed. It just makes it more interesting to be able to control the momentum a little bit and control what the listener is seeing,” Fink explains.
When asked if the first-person narration was a challenge in establishing chemistry with her fellow castmates, Quinn says, “A great thing about working in the Unlicensed world is that we’re close, and we can talk to each other. No matter what the medium, and no matter the order, I always have to find time to spend with the people I’m going to be working with to remember them, so that I can tap into the ‘imaginary friend’ of them that I’ve made in my head.”
The Future Of Unlicensed
Are there any more cases in Molly and Lou’s future? The passion from the team is there. “If I could, I’d spend the rest of my life writing Unlicensed,” Fink says.
Could Molly and Lou tackle any more topical issues in the future?
“For the first three seasons, we kind of thought about it by elements,” said Fink. “So the first season was about fire. The whole thing was built around a growing fire. The second season was about water and water rights in California, and the third season was about earth and earthquakes. So we would need to do an air season. Maybe it would be about air pollution.”
In a world where our regulatory institutions are under attack, the cases write themselves. I don’t know if the world needs a Sam Spade or a Phillip Marlowe, but we could definitely use a Molly & Lou.
All episodes of Unlicensed Season 1, Season 2, and Season 3 are available now on Audible.
Categorized: Interviews