Month-to-Month: Episodic Medium's Spring Schedule

Some reflections of the community we're building and the community that built us

Month-to-Month is out bi-monthly-ish check-in on the shows we’ll be covering in the upcoming season. If you want future updates on what we’re covering and first reviews of every show, become a free subscriber. To get every review and join in the discussion in the comments, paid subscriptions are $5 a month and for a week yearly subscriptions are discounted to $45.

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Episodic Medium wouldn’t be possible without The A.V. Club—the majority of our contributors wrote reviews for the site, and those who didn’t were heavily influenced by the way the site’s TV Club section shaped weekly coverage of television in their formative years.

But it’s no secret that this newsletter-turned-website exists because of the collapse of The A.V. Club as we once knew it. If you’re new around these parts and don’t know the origin story, I was among the many contributors who walked away from writing for the site—after over 11 years—when G/O Media tried to force the relocation of editorial to Los Angeles, effectively erasing the leadership that had made the site what it was. I started Episodic Medium as a solo project to keep writing about TV I care about, but it turns out that many of the site’s freelancers were looking for the same, and we’ve spent the last two years growing our ranks to 12+ contributors with the support of paid subscribers.

We’ve also spent the last two years in a state of rolling eulogy for The A.V. Club as we knew it. With each new act of malfeasance by Jim Spanfeller and Co., Twitter and other platforms have reflected on what the site meant to them and what has been lost in the process. And I’ll admit that each time this happens, it’s an opportunity for Episodic Medium—when the site experiments with A.I. articles or advertises for a new Editor-in-Chief with language that reveals the erosion of the site’s brand, readers lament the loss of what was, and this newsletter exists to recreate the TV part of that with reader support.

Last week brought us the latest example: shortly after G/O Media announced they were selling the site to Paste Magazine, the site’s comment functionality disappeared. The comments returned the following day—after the new owners forced G/O to reactivate them, per unconfirmed reports—but it’s notable that Paste doesn’t have comments on its existing site, so the long-term future of this part of The A.V. Club remains unclear. And that 24-hour removal was enough to spark another set of eulogies—including in the Substack chat of this newsletter—about what the community of The A.V. Club meant to people. And while the comment sections were a huge part of every part of the site, there’s no question they were especially vital to the weekly conversations about TV shows—whether it was the ongoing community that emerged on the final Community review, or the Lost rewatches that kept happening in the final Lost (Classic) review I wrote for the site in 2015, the serialized nature of TV was the foundation of that community, and I always valued the opportunity to engage in debate and dialogue with readers.

Most of those comments were a handful of people rewatching and reviewing later seasons we never got to (since the site had covered them originally). I’ve floated the idea of doing 4-6 with Noel alongside his forthcoming book with Emily St. James, but we’ll see what we both have time for.

Accordingly, comments have been central to the ethos of Episodic Medium: while it’s maybe easier to argue for the “value” of a $5 monthly subscription with the number of reviews you’ll receive in your inbox, I’ve always felt the community discussion that follows a review is worth even more. If there’s a person on the internet who’s lamenting what was briefly lost, and frankly what had been lost a long time ago based on the site’s management priorities, I would hope that our subscribers would tell them about what we’re building, because creating space for dialogue with and within our readership is crucial to our mission.

However, at the same time, I want to make something clear: while the slow death of The A.V. Club as we knew it is technically “good for business” from the perspective of maintaining growth and supporting this newsletter and its contributors, it is not an actual net good for the state of television criticism, and for entertainment journalism broadly. I am never happy to be charting the latest injustice done to a site I once loved, and to the employees who remain. While there was some awkwardness in the immediate aftermath of the editorial exodus, I’ve never blamed any of the full-timers who chose steady employment in a time of deep uncertainty, or any of the freelancers trying to make ends meet. And while I know that every eulogy is effectively a judgment on their work, and I’ve participated in that discourse out of a combination of sadness and self-interest, there has always been a kernel of potential amidst the mismanagement that is worth saving, and which I truly hope is given a chance to thrive at Paste (and their insistence on the comments remaining is a good sign in that direction).

This climate of layoffs and sell-offs is an argument for platforms like Substack that provide writers with the infrastructure to directly connect with readers and disconnect from the toxicity of venture capital’s takeover of sites like The A.V. Club—we might not always cover exactly what you want, or write about shows exactly as you want us to, but our core values are never going to change on the whims of wealthy owners trying to wring us out. As I’ve noted, there are also good arguments against platforms like Substack given what other types of people seek alternative distribution methods for their hateful and damaging speech, and I understand if not everyone is willing to accept my begrudging acknowledgment that ethical capitalism is a misnomer in our current hellscape. Right now, for better or worse, it’s our best and most sustainable path to building the community we want to have in that hellscape.

But let me be clear: I don’t want Episodic Medium to thrive on the backs of the collapse of sites I care about—I’m happy to have any former A.V. Club commenters who are looking for a place to talk about the TV they watch on a weekly basis, but I would much rather their original community still existed, and that our reviews can exist in dialogue with those at The A.V. Club and sites like it. I was thrilled that the comment sections returned, and I’ll be more thrilled if the site’s new management recommits to the community dynamics that were once central to the site, and which honestly started going downhill long before the editorial exodus—just look at this reflection I wrote back in 2016 about the end of coverage for shows like Adventure Time and the loss of the communities built around them. At the time, I wrote the following about the inevitable death of “community” in the context of online journalism:

“What it’s not is “content.” You can’t share a community on Facebook. A community isn’t going to drive Twitter traffic, unless that community is on Twitter. You can’t monetize a comment community, at least not in the current online journalism climate. And so there is no incentive for websites to organize their coverage models around principles of community: there is incentive to create content that can be shared where those communities are forming elsewhere (Facebook, Twitter, etc.).”

I don’t think this has changed in the intervening years, and the absence of comments at Paste does make me wonder if they are going to commit to what kind of community could exist around the site. But one thing that has changed is that in running this newsletter, I get to define how valuable comment sections and community are. It’s why I’ve limited comments to paid subscribers, which might limit the number of comments but also ensures a more productive dialogue free of trolls and disruptors. It’s why I do bi-weekly discussion threads where we can simply share what we’re watching. It’s why the Substack chat is available to paid subscribers as a way to start conversations about shows we’re not covering, or respond to breaking news. And it’s why I’m always thrilled when writers who got burnt out on the chaos of comment sections rediscover the value of being in conversation with readers in the space that we’ve created together.

All of this is to say that I’m really proud of the space we’ve built, and hope that it can exist alongside a healthy ecosystem for television criticism across the internet as much as that seems challenging in our current climate as we look ahead to our Spring programming.

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Spring Schedule

Let’s take a look at what shows we’ll be discussing with readers in the next few months as the spring comes to a close.

April

New or Returning Coverage

Star Trek: Discovery (April 4): Zack Handlen’s coverage of Discovery was ongoing during the show’s fourth season at The A.V. Club when it was trimmed due to low readership, but it seems fitting to let him finish out the show’s run here at Episodic Medium with the long-delayed fifth season.

Fallout (April 11): We had been all set to cover Amazon’s video game adaptation weekly, but then they switched gears and shifted to a binge release. But since I had already promised Les Chappell a chance to write about it, we’re experimenting with some bookend coverage a week apart, with the hope that our readers are interested and that maybe Amazon switches to weekly for a second season. 

The Sympathizer (April 14): To be honest, I got burned on our “let’s just cover all of HBO’s Sunday dramas” with the messy The Regime, which has struggled to penetrate the zeitgeist. But The Sympathizer has a plum pre-Emmys place in the schedule, director Park Chan-wook, a post-Oscars Robert Downey Jr. performance (as multiple characters), and the shared prestige of a Pulitzer Prize and A24. As such, Josh Spiegel will offer weekly coverage, and we’ll hope that HBO has more success finding the pulse of its viewers with this one.

The Veil (April 30): Speaking of The Regime, I’ll be following the lessons learned there and doing some bookend coverage of FX’s Elisabeth Moss limited series. I’ve seen the first four episodes (of six), and will say more when the embargo lifts, but we’re still working out how much of an audience limited series programming has when it’s not tied to the HBO ritual or an established franchise. Consider this a trial for how to handle these projects in the future.

Ongoing Coverage

April brings the end of our coverage coverage of Curb Your Enthusiasm’s final season and FX limited series Shogun, as well as ongoing coverage of the 46th season of Survivor and the third season of Abbott Elementary. And I’ll drop in on The Regime’s finale for anyone who persevered (or anyone curious how the show played out in the end).

May

New or Returning Coverage

Hacks (May 2): A combination of last year’s strikes and star Jean Smart’s heart surgery means it’s been two years since new episodes of the Max comedy—I wrote about that season with some weekly reflections, but the show deserves more detailed coverage, so Lisa Weidenfeld is thankfully stepping in to review the third season (which will have two episodes each week).

Doctor Who (May 10): Caroline Siede jumped back on the Doctor Who beat for the specials at the end of last year, and now it’s time for her to chart how Ncuti Gatwa’s 15th Doctor will play out in the show’s first new episodes since 2021. The eight-episode Season 14 begins with two episodes debuting on Disney+ in the U.S. alongside a midnight streaming debut in the U.K.

Ongoing Coverage

Another season of Survivor concludes, Abbott Elementary’s strike-shortened third season concludes, The Sympathizer wraps up its run just in time for the Emmys deadline, and I drop in on the finale of The Veil.

June

This remains tentative, as it’s still not clear what else might be scheduled this far out, but here’s a glimpse of a busy June for online fandoms—we’ll be back on the House of the Dragon and Star Wars beats, we’ll inaugurate some coverage of The Boys with the start of its fourth season, and I’m going to watch my screeners of The Bear as early as I can to pick out an episode or two within the binge that feels like it will generate individual discussion alongside the premiere and the finale. Additionally, LaToya Ferguson’s Episodic Classics coverage of The O.C. will continue with the all-important breakdown of what the hell happened in its third season.

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With the launch of a new schedule, I’m also making yearly subscriptions 10% off ($45) for the next week. Your investment in a year of the site helps sustain the site’s work, creating stable revenue levels to help us continue to evolve our coverage in the year ahead. In an increasingly chaotic media environment, I’m hopeful that people will be willing to pay to create the type of community we know is increasingly incompatible with the direction of media capital, and thanks to everyone who has helped us build Episodic Medium over the past 2+ years.

Episodic Observations

• I spent my weekend with the first section of the latest Is It Cake? season—sorry, Is It Cak3—which remains a charming trifle and I’m pleased that this season has seen significantly less time on “painting decoys” as a crucial skill. And then I capped it off with the first episode of Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show, which is absolutely filling that How To With John Wilson-sized hole in my heart. If you’ve ever wanted to see a stand-up comedian documenting his unrequited loves and Grindr hookups with a full camera crew while navigating his day-to-day career, this is the show for you.

• I also did get to both Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire over the past few weeks, and…look, both movies are fine, although it’s notable to me that they generate almost no momentum for their respective franchises. I understand that the relative collapse of the “too big to fail” MCU has studios spooked a bit, but after Monarch it seems strange to go back to the franchise and find almost no plans for the future. I’m just generally happy to be in a Dolby Cinema recliner for a blockbuster as a rule, and there are worse experiences than these movies in that setting, but neither has me amped to see more from the characters/scenarios in question.