Week-to-Week: Programming Notes for the rest of 2022
Ben Rosenstock formally joins the contributor list to react to Jennifer Coolidge on a Vespa
I’m in the the midst of catching up with some grading, and working on a more extensive newsletter for next week, so this will be a fairly minimal check-in to with some news about the calendars for the upcoming months here at Episodic Medium.
First, while it’s been on the calendar—which you can always find on our About page—since early in the summer, I did want to confirm that beginning October 30, we’ll be covering The White Lotus’ second season on a weekly basis. This anthology-turned-ongoing series swept through the Emmys with its first season, and is sacrificing its place in the Limited Series category by having Jennifer Coolidge recur as her character from the first installment.
Truth told, I started but did not finish the first season, which was part of why I decided this was an opportunity to bring in someone new to reflect on how the second season lives up to the first. Ben Rosenstock, who joined me to discuss Alaska Daily earlier this month, has been covering a number of shows for Vulture over the past few years, and I’m thrilled that he’ll be joining us to get the chance to engage with our community about the show. Reviews will go up on Sundays starting October 30.
There’s also been a few additional adjustments to the calendars for November and December that I wanted to bring to your attention.
The first is that Rick and Morty has gone on a midseason hiatus, and will return with new episodes on November 21, per available information. We also got a premiere date for Mythic Quest’s third season, which will be covered by another new contributor I’ll introduce closer to the date, and HBO confirmed a return date for His Dark Materials, which I had covered for The A.V. Club and will be covering here as well (although in two-episode chunks based on their scheduling).
You’ll also note that there is some room on the schedule with multiple shows concluding in October and November. I’m certainly interested in knowing what shows debuting in these months it feels like people want to read and discuss—we’re still covering far more shows than I had originally planned, and it’s inevitable that things will be slower during the holidays where we shouldn’t be checking our emails anyway, but I’m open to picking up coverage of a show or two as time and interest warrants. Metacritic has one of the better lists of premiere dates to peruse as we look ahead to the final months of the year.
Speaking of those final months, I’m also planning to offer some type of year-end content, in whatever form that ends up taking. As such, I’m interested in what kind of “Best Of” content people more appreciate, with the caveat that I abhor lists and find the very idea of ranking things absurd on its face.
Episodic Observations
Of the shows that are currently running that it feels people eventually decided were worth discussing, Apple TV+’s Bad Sisters absolutely became one of them, but it seemed like it happened right at the tail end of its run, without time for a full-scale bandwagon. I’ll admit that I haven’t really opened the Apple TV+ app in a long time since I was using screeners for my coverage of For All Mankind, but I’m curious if others registered this sense of FOMO just in time for last week’s finale.
I went to a larger social engagement for the first time in a while over the weekend, and was reminded that among normal people, Netflix’s Dahmer really was a full-scale phenomenon. It makes me wonder whether the audience for this newsletter—which I Tweet Threaded a bit about in the wake of some of the comments on both my She-Hulk and Zack’s Rings of Power finale reviews—would expand if we covered more normcore programming, or if that audience simply has no interest in this type of discourse about it.
I still don’t know that I fully grasp the idea that NBC believes Peacock is a viable space for substantial investment in original scripted programming, but I did watch Halloween Ends, Beast, and a bit of the Barney documentary series on the platform over the weekend, so I can see how once you end up in the ecosystem that there’s enough content to be on a basic level satisfied. But as someone who is still getting it included as a bonus with a cable subscription, the idea it’s ever going to be enough satisfaction to get me to pay outright remains a stretch.
I started AMC’s Interview with the Vampire, and enjoyed the first episode enough that I might try dropping in on an episode and seeing if there’s any appetite for discussion, provided that I get caught up on grading enough to catch up on the episodes on my DVR.
I'm a fan of themed / unranked end of year lists. 10 shows that were so 2022, the 5 best shows of the year you're not watching, my favourite shows of the year, etc. But maybe there's also a 'state of TV 2022' piece in there that isn't about particular shows, but about where TV is going this year compared to last. I dunno!
Any hope for some Derry Girls reviews?