Pledge-to-Pledge: Episodic Medium’s Annual Subscription Drive

Our yearly 20% off sale begins with a reflection on our origins

In case you’re finding us for the first time, Episodic Medium is a group newsletter edited by me—Myles McNutt—which delivers weekly reviews of television shows to your inboxes. It depends on subscriber support to exist, allowing me to bring in a stable of 15 contributors who have covered over 60 different shows for paid subscribers whose contributions have helped build a new home for television criticism. You can read out About Page to find out more about our basic mission, and if you’re already sold, here’s a quick link to subscribe and you can skip the rest of pitch.

Episodic Medium is also, it must be said, a byproduct of another website’s collapse. There’s no way around it: I started this newsletter after the editorial staff of The A.V. Club were forced out of their Chicago-based jobs by G/O Media, and the majority of the contributors who have joined me over the last two and a half years were similarly orphaned A.V. Club freelancers looking for the opportunity to keep writing about television the way they had for years. When I made our pitch to subscribers, I was implicitly saying that the website we used to write for existed in name only, and we would be the the ones carrying on its legacy: if you wanted the old A.V. Club back, you gave us your $5 a month and hoped we lived up to the promise of reviewing television weekly like it wasn’t going out of style.

However, over the past few months the situation at The A.V. Club has changed. G/O sold the site to Paste, our former TV editor Danette Chavez was hired as the site’s editor-in-chief, and many of the familiar faces who left the site over the years (including several of our contributors here at Episodic Medium) have returned. I want to be clear that we were never in a blood feud with the remaining staff of The A.V. Club, and I’ve been thrilled to see Noel (and Emily), Caroline, Les, and others’ bylines pop back up on my feeds these past few weeks. But if I’m being honest, there’s a part of me that felt bittersweet about the site’s revival given that circumstances have positioned me as the editor of a competitor, and thus unable to have the same homecoming as my colleagues.¹

When I took a step back, though, I realized that this is a perfect opportunity to assert something very clearly: television criticism is a community, not a competition. Sure, online journalism is inherently competitive as a battle for clicks, but the actual art of critiquing television has been a communal act even before critics embraced blogging and social media. The very fact I’m writing this is because the conversations critics like Alan Sepinwall, Maureen Ryan, Daniel Fienberg, and James Poniewozik had on Twitter when I was in college were a public dialogue, one they graciously welcomed me and other now established critics into through our own blogs and feeds. Critics linked to each other’s reviews and showed up in other critics’ comments, prioritizing the opportunity for discourse and debate over pushing subscriptions or competing for SEO placement.

This was the kind of shameless networking that defined the early days of TV Twitter, which seems cringe now but this was just the kind of open dialogue folks were creating.

When it came to my former home at The A.V. Club, Episodic Medium’s origins led us to stray from this principle of community in order to build one of our own. It made sense, to be clear: many of our writers were returning to beats they had left at The A.V. Club (beginning with Donna Bowman’s reviews of Better Call Saul and Zack Handlen’s Star Trek coverage), and we naturally wanted to emphasize that readers of those reviews could reconnect with their writing here. And as Donna wrote back in 2022, being able to return to writing for an engaged and civilized audience was—and remains—a welcome throwback to the early days of TV Club, and I’d add that being able to do so without intrusive ads or an obstructive layout was—and remains—a definite upgrade.

But Episodic Medium’s ultimate goal is to help create a sustainable future for television criticism, and this goal is better achieved with a healthy and vibrant A.V. Club than one dragged down by the corruption of venture capital. Not only does it create more of the dialogue and debate that I consider fundamental, but it also helps support our shared freelancers, who represent an increasing percentage of the critical community and need as many outlets as they can get. I hope that some of our younger contributors who aren’t alumni might have a chance to see their bylines on the site where so many of us plied our trade, and hope that the site can thrive for years to come.

“Readers Like You”

The rebirth of The A.V. Club may not have given me a homecoming, but it helped put into perspective what exactly my new home at Episodic Medium has been able to add to the television criticism community over the past two and a half years. This year alone, we’ve reviewed over 200 episodes of television, and I’ve been able to pay freelancers a rate above what I was making with The A.V. Club, with over $70,000 paid out directly to writers other than myself since February 2022. Our articles might not go viral, and our social networks are basically tapped out, but we have built a sustainable model for writer-owned, independent television criticism that has far surpassed my wildest imaginations when I dipped my toe in the water and asked people to start paying for something they’ve typically gotten for free.

That “we” includes our readers, of course. None of this would be possible without the almost 1800 people who have at one point or another been paying subscribers to Episodic Medium. That so many people have been willing to support our mission has been humbling—in PBS tradition, Episodic Medium really is what it is thanks to “Readers Like You.” The PBS analogy tracks on multiple levels: as much as I strongly believe we are offering tremendous value for your $5 a month (especially now that the majority isn’t written by me and I don’t devalue it out of self-deprecation), I also know that many of you keep subscribing to the site even if you’re not watching anything we’re reviewing. Much as we support public television even if we aren’t the target audience for all of its programming, our continuing and yearly subscribers are helping support reviews of shows they might not watch, but serve one audience or another.

I’ve been going back and forth about comparing our yearly subscriber push to a public television pledge drive. We aren’t a non-profit, exactly, and to position television criticism as public service is overstating our importance to the social fabric. However, the “pledge drive” logic applies for me in this case because as a writer-owned and reader-supported newsletter, what we’re really asking for you to do during this period is invest in our mission. I want you to think of this as more than buying access to reviews because it is more than just producing content to me. It’s about supporting our writers, strengthening the community of television criticism, and building something that can keep doing that for a long time.

Support for a Sustainable Future

I mentioned above that Episodic Medium is a sustainable model, and that’s true provided that I continue editing it for free, which…I suppose that’s not exactly sustainable, is it? Having just given incoming university freshmen a speech about burnout, it would be hypocritical to suggest I could balance these responsibilities forever. I’m proud of what we put out into the world and the value it represents, but I know that I deserve to be compensated for my own labor of copy-editing and promoting all of our reviews, and that the site’s future would be stronger if I could afford to bring in one of our contributors to help in editorial. And realistically, our options for achieving this are either raising the monthly and yearly subscription rates, or significantly increasing our number of subscribers.

I am inclined to follow the latter approach for a few reasons. First, I know that there are plenty of people out there for whom even $5 a month is a significant ask: when people unsubscribe, they sometimes leave notes, and often the reason is simply a lack of available funds. I feel confident that the actual value of what we’re offering is higher than $5 a month (given that rate was what I set when it was just going to be me reviewing a show or two at a time), but creating a higher barrier to entry doesn’t fit with the goal of creating a community.

Second, though, I want to take this opportunity to see if there’s people out there that we haven’t reached yet. I’ve never advertised the Substack in any meaningful way beyond my own social media platforms, and every time a new person finds it I wonder if there’s hundreds or thousands more who simply aren’t aware that we’re here. Asking every subscriber to contribute more when there might be more people out there who would support us if they knew we existed seems wrong.

So for the month of September, our annual subscription drive will be our push to build the most prosperous future for Episodic Medium. I want to be able to grow, bringing in new contributors and covering new shows, but there needs to be a better foundation for us to do that. So rather than setting stretch goals tied to new coverage, we’re simply trying to improve our subscriber base to ensure we can plan for that future in a sustainable way. Annual subscriptions are reduced by 20% to $40 for your first year, which is the lowest they’ll ever be (especially if we decide we need to raise prices in the future).

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Regardless of your status with the newsletter, this month is about asking you to do what you can to help us build the Episodic Medium community in the year to come. With that in mind, there’s three ways to offer us your support that I want to highlight

Join us for the first time

There are over 6000 people who are subscribed to this newsletter and have never been a paying subscriber. You’ve had more than enough reminders of what you’re missing, and so I’m never mad when someone doesn’t want to be a paying subscriber. But if you’ve been on the fence, this is absolutely the time to take the leap.

Become a founding member

if you’re someone who has the ability to give more on a yearly basis, the Founding Member subscription option is designed to help you support our mission beyond our regular subscribers. I’m still committed to finding some special perks for this (Advisory Board, maybe?), but in the meantime it’s the best way to pledge your support if you’re an existing paid subscriber.

Spread the word

While we’ll be running some ads and doing some collaborations throughout the month in support of our pledge drive, ultimately the best resource we have is our existing paid subscribers. This is the time to tell your friends and social networks if you value this community. (Substack actually has a referral program, but it isn’t possible to limit it to paid subscriptions, and giving away paid subscriptions for free referrals is silly).

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So this month more than ever is the time to hit those “Share” buttons, or forward our reviews to your friends, or direct them to this page to learn more about the community we’re trying to build. This week we’ll have our full fall schedule announcement on Thursday, and then I’ll hopefully have some updates on some additional programming to come later in the month.

This remains a small operation, and the fact that our annual subscription drive coincides with the start of the academic semester is an unfortunate reality, but I’m hopeful we can create some buzz and help make this newsletter sustainable for the long term with the help of our contributors and you, our subscribers. Thank you for reading, and for whatever support you can offer us in the month ahead.

All the best,

Myles McNutt

Editor-in-Chief, Episodic Medium

1. To be clear, I don’t think I’d necessarily not be allowed to write for The A.V. Club (it’s not like my current editor, me, would object), but it just makes more practical sense to publish my work to support the newsletter.