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Someone is changing all the streetlights in Pepper Heights, Cleveland. The color of nighttime is shifting. Everyone thinks they know what happened at the Pepper Heights Zoo… But do they, really? Dane, a spun-out musician spending the winter in Cleveland, Ohio, has two main goals: keeping his job at the Pepper Heights Zoo and trying not to waste all his time on Grindr. What he doesn’t expect is to get swept into a story about dreams, about forevers, about flickering lights, about unexplained deaths, about relentless change, and about the parts of ourselves that we wish other people knew to look for. Oh, and also a murderous zebra.
A lion chases the escapees; you may feel the supermarket apology more sharply.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A microphone test drifts into family memory while Anthem waits just outside the room.
The episode finds its shape in a microphone test, following the host through a nervy live drift from a CBD pod vape and a wheezing 20th-century Dell to Lighty, an African gray parrot, and a wall of photographs.
A zoo escape becomes grotesque, funny, and surreal under a square of real night sky.
The zoo escape sharpens from back-hall dread into a strange, physical nightmare as the narrator, Luke, Jennifer, Meryl, and the twins move toward the missing girls and the source of a scream.
A tired, candid studio check-in catches Dreamboy's last-minute song work with warmth and a little fray.
Dreamboy's Episode 7.5 sits in the late-night pressure zone before Episode 8, with Ellie and Dane still in the studio after weeks of long days since the holidays.
A zebra-striped rally gives way to a blackout, a fence breach, and a stranger threshold.
The Rally frames a late-night protest as odd civic theater, with Diana Greasefire leading chants for Zoe, thanking Pepper Heights Elementary for a children's song, and settling in with a zebra-striped sleeping bag and mask.
A surreal, uneasy episode where underwater dread gives way to zoo-after-hours desire.
The episode begins in a strange, dreamlike enclosure: a speaker curled inside a huge fish, settled on its rough tongue while pale light slips in through the mouth and eyes.
A threatened home, a secretive family, and serpents under the roots give this rural mystery its bite.
Dane and Ellie begin by rallying an army of Dream Kittens to keep Dream Boy going, before the story turns toward Pepper Heights and Della Roach's endangered home.
Dice, divine mysteries, and the trouble with good intentions.
Dreamboy's "Anthem: Homunculus" opens with Kian on a porch at Centerpoint Trailer Court in Junction City, Kansas, asking a live audience for the $100,000 needed to remove a high-grade brain tumor.
Dreamboy's "The Great Pornography of the Cosmos" turns Pepper Heights Zoo into a late-night break-in after a power outage opens the animal gates.
Dreamboy episode 7.5 is a studio conversation with Ellie and Dane after five or six weeks of 60-hour workweeks, with Dane leaving for tour the next day.
Dream Boy's The Rally opens on Diana Greasefire, Miss Hernandez's second grade class, free coffee from Settler's Coffee, and a crowd chanting Say Zoe outside Pepper Heights.
Dreamboy's "Jupiter's Lifeless Moons" follows a Pepper Heights Zoo worker whose day starts with a fish dream and a missed text from Luke.
Dreamboy's “Heart of the Rock” follows Dane and Luke Prescott after they rescue Cora Della Roach from a kitchen fire at 1307 Woodshire Road in Cleveland, Ohio.
A holiday interlude featuring a fictional radio telethon within the surreal narrative of Dreamboy.
Dreamboy's The Blue Hand follows the narrator and Luke through a strange day in Pepper Heights involving shared dreams, blue hand-shaped bruises, missing backpacks, and children organizing an all-night rally for Zoe at the zoo.
Dreamboy’s “Goodnight, Esmerelda” follows Dane Terry’s exhausted move from New York to Cleveland, where he takes a job at the Pepper Heights Zoo.