Week-to-Week: State of the Substack
A New Contributor to guide us through (Strange) New Worlds, and a look at Episodic Medium's Summer Schedule
It’s been a busy week at Episodic Medium, and combined with a busy week concluding my semester—if you’re not aware, I’m an Associate Professor of Media Studies—it means that there isn’t time for a full newsletter this week. But given that free subscribers—and the internet—got my full season of episodic coverage of Netflix’s Heartstopper along with my interview with author/writer Alice Oseman, I figure we can take this week’s newsletter to cover some business.
When I wrote my post introducing Episodic Medium just over two months ago, this was one of my parting thoughts:
“However, my goal here is to keep doing what I love in a way that is financially sustainable, effectively hoping to achieve an equivalent to the freelance income I could earn for this level of productivity. If the community grows well beyond that goal, however, I would not just plan on pocketing the difference. In the off chance that occurs, I would look to add freelance contributors to cover shows I’m not watching, and to grow the community further. That’s getting very far ahead of ourselves, but consider it a “stretch goal” just in case.”
Well, as you may well know if you’ve been following along here at Episodic Medium, that moment came faster than I could have realized. Admittedly, the arrival of Donna Bowman’s Better Call Saul reviews was a distinct circumstance, but the huge influx of readers also transformed the scale of this community. Suddenly, there’s 1000+ total subscribers to Episodic Medium, with hundreds of you paying for access to all of the site’s content along with the ability to join the conversation across all of the reviews and discussions happening here.
Now, admittedly, the realities of subscription-based services like Substack means that this growth may not be sustainable: “churn” is inevitable in any such endeavor, in particular one where the majority of those subscribers are here specifically for Donna’s reviews which will conclude in mid-August (and which go on a two-month hiatus at the end of May). But what it means is that I have the resources available to spend the next four months convincing monthly subscribers as well as those still on-the-fence about subscribing that this community is worth investing in on a long-term basis.
Which is why, as we continue to chart new territory, it’s only fitting that the first piece of that puzzle is the introduction of another new contributor, and a familiar face to A.V. Club readers: Zack Handlen, one of the longest-running TV Club writers, will be covering the first season of Paramount+’s anticipated spin-off Star Trek: Strange New Worlds for Episodic Medium every Thursday starting with the premiere next week on May 5.
If you’re a follower of Zack’s work for The A.V. Club, then you know he wrote about a wide range of series for the site for nearly 15 years, which has recently included episodic coverage of Wheel of Time, Rick & Morty, Fargo, and Westworld. He also spent years covering The Walking Dead, and with Emily St. James is the co-author of Monsters of the Week: The Complete Critical Companion to The X-Files. He’s also been on the Star Trek beat for a long time, both at The A.V. Club—with Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Picard, and “Classic” reviews of Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine—and at his Patreon with “Classic” reviews of Star Trek: Voyager and most recently Star Trek: Lower Decks.
It’s thrilling to be able to have Zack join me here at Episodic Medium: beyond the inherent excitement of “getting the band back together” and trying to make it 2012 again through science or magic, Zack is a tremendously skilled writer, whose long-term investments in shows and franchises has paid dividends for his readers, and I’m so pleased that circumstances have allowed his work to find a home in this newsletter.
With Zack’s arrival starting next week, the schedule for May is falling into place, but I wanted to offer a clearer glimpse of everything that will be happening over the next four months. These calendars are, of course, subject to change, but based on how things have gone so far, I would anticipate this would only mean adding more coverage, whether by existing contributors like Zack and Donna or new voices. With subscriptions subject to fluctuation, I can’t make any firm commitments at the moment, but stay tuned here and on my Twitter for news if I start searching for more contributors or floating other shows to cover in the future.
May continues my coverage of the 42nd season of Survivor, along with the conclusion of Donna’s reviews of the first half of Better Call Saul’s sixth season and Zack’s reviews of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. There will be some travel disruptions during the final week that will delay perspective on the Survivor finale—I’ll put up a discussion post—and the premiere of Obi-Wan Kenobi, which will continue to be covered in June.
June sees a pileup on Wednesdays with the overlap between the run of Obi-Wan and the next MCU TV series, Ms. Marvel. In addition to the continued coverage of Strange New Worlds, June also adds the third season of Apple TV+’s For All Mankind, along with the second season of Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building.
July sees Ms. Marvel and Strange New Worlds end their runs, but Donna’s reviews of Better Call Saul will return on July 11, while coverage of Only Murders in the Building and For All Mankind continues.
August marks the end of the line for Better Call Saul and For All Mankind, but it also marks the beginning of the high fantasy face-off, with coverage of HBO’s anticipated House of the Dragon and Amazon’s massively expensive The Rings of Power, which will together carry Episodic Medium into the fall.
This is, frankly, a more ambitious calendar than I could have imagined two months ago, and still it’s leaving off anything on Netflix—I expect I’ll write something about Stranger Things, but not episodically—as well as some marquee HBO and Disney+ titles that don’t yet have release dates. And it would give me a great deal of pleasure to be able to add to these calendars in the months ahead, and to keep growing the roster of contributors, and to be able to pay them at better rates with the confidence of knowing that this community can keep thriving well into the fall and the new year. And that will ultimately be determined by how subscriptions ebb and flow over the course of the summer.
I know, as always, there are many factors that play into one’s decision on whether to subscribe to something in this day of So Many Subscriptions, but with the addition of new contributors I feel more strongly than ever about the value of this community: in the comments on Donna’s most recent Better Call Saul review, subscriber AMMacKK writes that it’s “great to see that the reviews and comments on this site are flourishing; the sense of community started at AV Club feels like it is very much living on at its new home,” and I couldn’t agree more. Another subscriber, though, wrote the following, which I want to address:
I am trying to avoid Substack, but I couldn't make it through this final season of BCS without reading your commentary.
So, back in February when I was making the decision on the best way to launch Episodic Medium, I did what I would best describe as a “cursory” search to determine what the platform had done to address the concerns raised about hate speech on Substack in early 2021, particularly as it relates to the platforming of transphobic writers. And after I mostly found articles from the previous spring and summer about their efforts to address this, I chose to believe that if this was still a pressing concern, I’d be hearing about it in my feed.
And then, two weeks after pulling the trigger on starting here at Substack, this headline from Mashable came across my feed: Why Substack writers are leaving the platform, again. And I realized that my search had been cursory because I instinctively knew I was going to be faced with the conclusion that the established nature of Substack within the cultural consciousness would make this project more legible to a larger audience. And the stats have born this out—of the paid subscribers to Episodic Medium, roughly 2/3 had existing Substack accounts, and 1/3 were already paying for other Substacks.
I could go deeper on my feelings about the impossibility of ethical capitalism, and the mental gymnastics I do to suggest that the work I put out and the work I do in the classroom somehow serves like a “hate speech offset” of the 10% of the earnings that are theoretically contributing to the platforming of harmful writing here on Substack. But I just want to say that if you have concerns about supporting the site due to Substack’s failures to address content moderation on its platform, I completely understand. And if you want to talk about other options for joining the community, shoot me a DM on Twitter and we’ll chat.
Alright, that’s it—that’s the State of the Substack for Episodic Medium as we enter May. Thanks for reading, and I’m so looking forward to seeing what conversations and connections we’ll create as the summer goes on.
All the best,
Myles McNutt
Editor (I guess?), Episodic Medium
Good news all around. I'd love to see this become TV Club 2.0. Nice to see Zack coming on board. Lots of shows on that slate that I plan on watching.
I feel like this is already becoming the TV Club that I've been missing! Very excited to see how this grows.
Substack is not my favorite, so if you find a better venue I'll come along.