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

We don't *have* to go back, but we might as well, eh?

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 two weeks yearly subscriptions are discounted to $45.

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If there’s one thing that editing Episodic Medium has made clear, it’s that the cycles of television releases are increasingly inscrutable. This is our third summer, but there’s only a single summer series we cover—Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building—that has managed to release episodes every year.¹ Every show we covered last July is missing its typical release window due to delays from the writers and actors’ strike actions, while House of the Dragon is back after a two-year hiatus.

We always expected the strikes would create somewhat of a gap in the television release schedule, and we probably should have assumed that it would end up being during the summer. This was historically when we would take a breather from a jam-packed broadcast season, and in the era of DVDs—or torrents—catch up on shows we might have missed. It’s also a time of year where we’re busy with summer travel and blockbuster movies, and so if the major streaming services and cable channels were going to catch their breath in the wake of the strikes, this was the time to do it.

But here at Episodic Medium, we like to try to fill those gaps—last fall we introduced Episodic Classics coverage, where Dennis Perkins revisited the two seasons of Mike White’s Enlightened and LaToya Ferguson is now onto season three of her return to The O.C. While there were a number of great pitches from our contributors for additional coverage, the fact was that the fall/spring schedules filled up pretty sufficiently, making it hard to stretch our budget—entirely generated through your subscriptions—to allow for more. My approach was therefore to wait for the summer to see both whether Classics coverage would be necessary and what types of shows might feel like a fit for the zeitgeist at a given moment.

Even before I announced Classics coverage, there were requests for one show in particular. When Emily St. James left The A.V. Club, she was only a few weeks into TV Club Classic coverage of Lost, and I had the honor of taking the beat for the first and second seasons. The reviews were explicitly designed to fill a gap in the site’s archive, as TV Club as a section originated in 2007 after Lost’s third season had finished airing. The goal was to bring the reviews full circle, and since Noel Murray had covered the later seasons of the show for the site, I pitched our editor Erik Adams that Noel should be a part of the reviews of season three. The result were a series of cross-talks on key episodes in the season, bringing the past and present into dialogue in honor of the show’s legacy.

It was gratifying that the site’s readers connected with our reviews, to the point where they were quite displeased that our intention was to stop there—some continued on with their own rewatch of seasons 4-6 in the comments of the final review, but our assigned task was complete. When I started Episodic Medium as solely a personal project seven years later, I certainly had the idea of continuing the reviews in my back pocket, and being able to bring contributors like Noel onboard made it an even higher possibility. But I wasn’t sure if there would be an audience for returning to Lost in an era of Peak TV, even if I knew there were some devoted readers out there who had pinged us about it.

We’re not going to hold him to this, but just saying that the “Founding Members” option is available and I promise when things settle down later in the summer I’ll put some perks together for those who’ve kindly supported the site with additional contributions

But sometimes the stars just align. Earlier this year, Noel and Emily’s Lost: Back to the Island was formally—and finally, I’ve known about it forever—announced for a September 17 release, bringing their respective brilliant perspectives on the show to bookstore shelves everywhere this fall. And just a month or so ago, it was announced that Lost would be returning to Netflix—the only streaming platform where it seems like older shows can take on new life even if they’ve been streaming on another service the entire time—on July 1. And after Mo Ryan’s tremendous Burn It Down last year pushed us to reflect more on the show’s toxicity behind-the-scenes and its impact on the on-screen drama, it seems like it’s as good a time as any to return to the island, especially with the gap in the schedule.

Accordingly, starting Monday, Episodic Medium will begin our Episodic Classics coverage of Lost with season four. As before, I’ll be the primary writer covering the series, but Noel will be joining me for three of the four reviews to cover the premiere, finale, and of course “The Constant.” I’m especially excited to get some additional insight into his process of working on the book with Emily, which we’ll have more coverage of closer to its September release. We don’t have formal plans on covering additional seasons, as it will depend on subscriber interest, future scheduling, and our own personal commitments—however, it is certainly my intention (as with The O.C.) to see it through to the end. But it’s a start, at least, and I’m thrilled to start discussing “The Beginning of the End” and “Confirmed Dead” on Monday.

If you want to get “caught up,” I’ve put together a page here at Episodic Medium with quick links to all of the TV Club Classic reviews of Lost, which The A.V. Club has made incredibly difficult to access through some broken tags as they transition to their new ownership at Paste. I wish that my carefully chosen screenshots hadn’t been deleted by G/O a few years back, but c’est la vie.

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This won’t be our only look back in July, although this one is notably a lot more recent. Silo was an example of an Apple TV+ series that didn’t have a lot of buzz before it debuted, but it gained some additional traction, and we had a great Episodic Discussion about the season after it concluded. And so it felt like a good candidate for some catchup coverage, and Ben Rosenstock—who didn’t watch season one yet—has kindly agreed to step in to head underground ahead of the show’s season two return this fall (which he’ll also be covering). That coverage will cover two episodes a week beginning July 23.

August brings two new series we’re covering, along with two new contributors. Like The Gilded Age before it, HBO’s Industry debuted as a Monday show, but the strikes have elevated it to the channel’s prime Sunday spot when it returns for season three in August. William Goodman, who has covered the show with interviews for Complex, joins Episodic Medium to cover the arrival of familiar faces Sarah Goldberg and Kit Harrington when it premieres on August 11.

Meanwhile, Liam Mathews recently joined Substack with his newsletter Dad Shows, which focuses on an increasingly dominant genre within streaming television. And so after meeting Liam earlier this year and seeing his interest in the genre, he felt like the perfect fit to reflect on Apple TV+ and Bill Lawrence’s upcoming entry: the Vince Vaughnn-starring comic detective thriller Bad Monkey, based on the first Carl Hiaasen Andrew Yancy novel. Is it a Dad Show, and if so, how hard does it Dad? Liam will explore that and more as we wait for Lawrence’s other ongoing Apple series Shrinking to return in the fall.

Returning Coverage

• Only Murders in the Building (Myles McNutt, August 27)

• The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power (Zack Handlen, August 29)

Continuing Coverage

• House of the Dragon (Myles McNutt)

• The Acolyte (Josh Spiegel)

• The Boys (Alex McLevy)

• The Bear (Myles McNutt)

• The O.C. Classic (LaToya Ferguson)

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Here’s the full calendars for July and August.

As always, your continued support is necessary to keep Episodic Medium going and growing. For the two weeks (until 7/9), yearly subscriptions are discounted 10%—we are admittedly coming up on our yearly subscription drive in August/September, when the discount will be higher, but then you’d miss out on some great coverage over the new couple of months, so the extra $5 is worth it from my perspective. Thanks as always for being part of Episodic Medium, and I’m excited about what the next few months and beyond will hold.

Episodic Observations

• I could give you most of September’s schedule, but we’re missing official return dates for broadcast shows and we don’t have any date at all for The Penguin, which we learned this week will be among the last Max Original-branded original dramas with everything now bearing the HBO name. So we’ll circle back on that in August.

• In terms of last summer’s shows, it’s unclear which will make it this fall and which will get pushed to 2025. That’s already the case with Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and probably The Righteous Gemstones and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but I’m expecting a Halloween premiere for the final season of What We Do In The Shadows.

• There’s no doubt that Severance will be the single longest hiatus of a show we’ve covered, given that it will be over two and a half years by the time it returns this fall, but Mythic Quest isn’t going to be far behind it, given that it wasn’t in Apple’s fall promo and will likely slip to 2025.

• If there’s a show debuting in this period that’s closest to getting coverage, it’s season two of Apple TV+ drama Pachinko, but I don’t know if there’s enough discourse to justify the expense. But I’ll definitely be tuning in, and will write about it one way or another.

1. Technically, The Bear has also released new episodes every summer, but we didn’t cover season one and I only did a single newsletter on season two.