Season One, Episode 3

Synopsis
Will the famed storytelling cricket (Tim Robbins) return? Plus, Charlie Day and Mary Elizabeth Ellis perform Shakespeare as you’ve never heard it and the janitor pushes host John Cameron to the very brink.

Voiced Characters

 * Julian the Janitor
 * The Narrator
 * John Cameron
 * Leticia Saltier
 * Jacques
 * François
 * The Cricket
 * Macbeth Actors
 * Phone Operators
 * Radio Audience
 * Brooklyn Bagel Bakers
 * Crane Operator

Plot
Jacques and Francois chat about how Jacques caught Julian backstage, and how Julian seems to know where the acts come from. According to the janitor, not even John Cameron knows where the acts come from.

As the Orkestral performs with North the singing saw, listeners from all over the world tune in, talking about the cricket and what happened to him. At the Perpetual Broadcasting Corporation, the phone lines are overwhelmed by questions about the cricket.

Backstage, an exhausted John Cameron stands next to Julian, who's holding a cricket-sized casket. At 4 AM that morning, Julian had been searching the halls when he bumped into John, who is frazzled and blamed Julian for what happened. He admits that he doesn't know where the acts come from, and tries to ban Julian from coming near the show (again). Julian tries to calm him down, and tells him how to search for acts.

Later, Julian finds the cricket shaking his fist at the Orkestral. A hundred bags of fan-mail for the cricket arrive, and Jacques accidentally drops them on the cricket.

Back to the evening's show, John Cameron tries to keep the show going, ignoring the audience's cries for the cricket. As a performance of Macbeth takes the stage, no one, not even the stagehands pay attention. While John Cameron watches, the performance grows stranger and stranger, before Julian taps him on the shoulder to wake him up from his dream. Julian has found the cricket to be alive. Apparently, when the cricket saw all the letters fans had written him, he "fainted dead away." John Cameron hugs the janitor, and brings the cricket back onstage to finish his story.

The cricket tells the story of Ladislas Koskovsky, the clockmaker, who, when rejected, snapped and made dolls designed to frighten children. Due to a mismeasurement, the mechanism to scare the children never snapped, and instead Ladislas was famous for his wonderful dolls.