Month-to-Month: Episodic Medium's Winter 2024 Schedule

And some insights into our relationship with the platform that hosts us

Month-to-Month is our regular update on what we’re covering weekly here at Episodic Medium for our paid subscribers. If you’re new the newsletter and want to get future updates (including first reviews of the shows we’re covering), become a free subscriber.

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Last year, when both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA went on strike, it wasn’t clear what the early 2024 TV schedule would look like. Would broadcast shows even get to make shortened seasons? Would cable and streaming platforms be able to finish the shows that halted production? Here at Episodic Medium, we introduced Episodic Classics coverage to fill in some gaps, but it seemed plausible this would need to be our primary mode of criticism when we arrived at the new year.

As it turns out, the industry has largely absorbed the strikes’ impact in the short term: broadcast shows are returning, cable channels delayed enough shows they could have debuted in the fall to schedule their lineups, and streaming services like Apple TV+ have an apparently endless drip of content that seems undeterred by the labor stoppage. And while the spring will likely be less stacked than last year’s convergence of final seasons for shows like Succession and Ted Lasso, the year is still beginning with a schedule of mostly new and returning series that we’re planning to cover weekly.

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Before we get into that, though, a note on something that several subscribers have emailed me about. Late last year, The Atlantic published a report on the presence of Nazis making revenue on Substack, and an open letter circulated among Substack users asking management for a response. That response came in the final weeks of the year, and Ken White at The Popehat Report basically sums up my thoughts: it is an intellectually dishonest attempt to spin opportunity capitalism as free speech activism.

This was not “news” per se: it’s consistent with the platform’s previous positions on anti-trans content, and when I was invited to join the Substack “Product Lab” to help test out new features like Chat, I couldn’t help but notice that among those invited to the program was an anti-vaxx publication gleefully spreading misinformation (the contact at Substack apologized, saying they had intended to screen out those types of writers). I’ve always known that the 10% of Episodic Medium’s revenue that goes to Substack is indirectly supporting the platforming of content I vehemently oppose, and have had to face some harsh realities about the impossibilities of ethical capitalism as the newsletter has grown and allowed me to support our team of contributors.

Some of our subscribers have reached out and asked whether I intend to move to a new platform based on their specific position on Nazis, while others have canceled their subscription as part of a larger departure from the platform. I completely respect that decision, and if this newsletter was simply what it started as—a way for me to keep writing criticism—I’d have probably moved to a non-profit platform like Ghost long before now. But given that over ⅔ of our yearly revenue goes directly to paying freelance contributors, making that kind of change means threatening the long-term viability of this enterprise, and isn’t as simple as it might be otherwise.

It’s also not a simple thing for a “newsletter” that isn’t really a newsletter at all. As Kevin Kruse reflected after initially committing to finding a new home, it isn’t as simple as porting over email lists or payments (both of which are easy). Episodic Medium leverages community features of Substack like comments and chat that don’t exist on many services, or which require large monthly costs on others (Ghost charges for having more than two contributors, for example). Those costs would be balanced out by lower fees at our current scale, but not if our subscriber base were to contract in the future. There’s also the simple reality that our primary source of growth—and thus sustainability—has been through the Substack network: of our current paid subscribers, 76% were established Substack users. And with our largest network Twitter continuing to circle the drain (and largely tapped out), that’s a huge part of how we can fight churn and keep the site working.

Or, rather, how I can fight churn and keep the site working. Indeed, the biggest barrier to solving this problem is the fact that I am doing a full-time job part-time in order to make Episodic Medium work. I don’t have the time or resources to build an entirely new site from scratch, or to do the marketing legwork necessary to offset the risk of moving to a platform without the same recommendation engines and networking in place. I hate that the opportunity cost of Episodic Medium being viable is 10% of what you pay supporting a tech-pilled startup profiteering off of the worst people imaginable and pretending they’re not, but I also have to acknowledge that said company is crucial to sustaining the community we’ve created, at least until a competitor emerges that can more readily match its features (which I’ll obviously be on the lookout for) or we grow to a scale where the capital investment required is more justified.

And so as I preview the schedule ahead, asking you to continue supporting (or newly supporting) Episodic Medium, I want to be clear that I know what that means, and completely understand if that 10% changes your perspective. I hope you’ll understand my decision, which I’ve already discussed with our contributors, and that we can continue doing critical cultural work that I have to believe does its small part to combat whatever capitalist evil Substack is doing with that portion of your generous support.

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Speaking of those contributors, then, it’s time to get into our early 2024 schedule. I’ll have the calendars in a bit, but I prefer to organize this by contributor to remind myself of the tremendous critics that have become part of this site over the past nearly two years as we head toward our anniversary.

Donna Bowman was our first contributor to come onboard, and she’s still considering whether there’s a show early in the year that fits into her schedule. But if you want to put your thumb on the scales, I’ve got her thinking about whether she wants to join Robert and Michelle King on their journey back to the Good Wife universe with Carrie Preston spinoff Elsbeth, which debuts on February 29.

Zack Handlen has covered a wide range of shows for us since jumping onboard for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (which should be back later this year), but this winter he’s heading to 17th century Japan for FX’s Shogun, which debuts on February 27.

Noel Murray is still completing his reviews of FX’s Fargo into January, but he’ll be back on the weekly FX beat at the end of the month with Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, the long-gestating followup to the first installment of Ryan Murphy’s anthology drama. The series debuts January 31.

LaToya Ferguson completed her reviews of the first season of The O.C., and while none of what followed in the show matched the cultural impact of that first year, it seemed cruel to deny her the opportunity to explore how the show struggled to live up to it. So in addition to the return of her Abbott Elementary reviews in February, LaToya will begin our journey back to the halcyon days of 2005 with the second season of The O.C. on January 20.

It’s been a while since Josh Spiegel was covering Ahsoka, so I’m excited to have him back to tackle another long-gestating followup: Apple TV+’s Masters of the Air, a successor to Band of Brothers and The Pacific. Its first two episodes air on January 26.

Ben Rosenstock still had the final weeks of The Curse to wrap up in January, but then he’s moving onto a monumental conclusion: the final season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, which I couldn’t help but observe began when he was a child (I was only 14, to be fair). I’m excited to get his youthful perspective on the show’s legacy when it returns on February 4.

Lisa Weidenfeld has been off the schedule longer than any of her fellow contributors, having covered the now sadly canceled The Afterparty last summer. And truth told, we still don’t know exactly when she’ll be back, but she’s at the ready for the return of Max’s Hacks, which I covered way back in the spring of 2022 during the newsletter’s infancy.

Caroline Siede is fully on the Disney+ beat at the moment, and until Doctor Who returns later in the spring (the BBC seems to think May), she’s back this week covering the MCU with Echo…or, rather, covering the first ever “Marvel Spotlight” series that apparently won’t have any impact on the broader MCU continuity. We’re breaking our own binge release policy to cover the five-episode season daily starting tomorrow and continuing through Saturday.

Les Chappell kept himself busy covering both of the first two seasons of Our Flag Means Death in the fall, and will be returning to cover the latest effort to converge the video game and TV industries with Prime Video’s Fallout in April.

Dennis Perkins didn’t see a lot of conversation on his reviews of the first season of Mike White’s Enlightened, to be honest, but it seemed cruel to have him get all that momentum and then not get a chance to close the loop with the show’s stellar second season as well as we continue to wait out the return of The White Lotus. So later this month, he’ll be back to get through season two to fill in some gaps in the schedule ahead of February’s premiere, and hopefully the community will see this as another chance to revisit the series.

Alex McLevy is the newest writer to join the Episodic Medium team, and he’s got so much murder mystery moment after A Murder at the End of the World that I decided it just made more sense to keep that going into HBO’s reboot True Detective: Night Country, which starts its six-episode run on Sunday.

And as for me, in addition to the return of Survivor at the end of February, I’ll be tackling the heightened political limited series The Regime, starring Kate Winslet, when it hits HBO on March 3. I’m also at the ready for when Apple decides the second season of Severance is ready, although it would appear at this point that won’t be until summer at the earliest.

And here’s what the next three months look like in calendar form. There’s a lot of other shows premiering, and I’ll be doing my best to cover them at least in part in the Week-to-Week newsletters. If there’s a show you’re particularly interested in hearing more about in newsletter form, pop into our Substack Chat to make a note of it. Also, the Abbott Elementary episodes will probably be spread out a bit, but I just made it weekly for the sake of efficiency.

And that’s our early 2024. Thank you again to all of you for being part of this journey, and if you’re excited to read more about these shows in the months head, the majority of your $5 a month goes toward supporting our work and creating a stable foundation for our future.