Month-to-Month: Episodic Medium's Summer 2026 Schedule

You may have noticed that we never had a formal announcement for a spring schedule here at Episodic Medium.

Mind you, free subscribers to the newsletter received the first review of every new show we covered, so it’s not as though you weren’t up-to-date on what you were missing if you’re not a paid subscriber. I may have been remiss in my duty as editor-in-chief to spread the word, but our contributors kept writing, and our community kept commenting. I don’t know that I would call Episodic Medium a well-oiled machine, but there’s a momentum behind this project that could carry us through a missed schedule announcement.

It’s had to carry us through a lot in the past year or so. Just as we were preparing to make our move to Ghost, the contours of my actual job changed suddenly, creating a set of challenges that have carried into 2026. It’s made it hard for me to do as I’ve done throughout Episodic Medium’s life once it evolved into an actual publication and do All The Jobs. I mostly wasn’t writing weekly newsletters, and I wasn’t doing a great job of marketing our work, with my attention focused on the thing that needed to be done (editing work and doing the behind-the-scenes labor to keep the newsletter operational) and the thing that I started this newsletter to do (writing weekly criticism of shows like Heated Rivalry and Survivor).

The fact that we’re still in solid shape despite this is a credit to our contributors and their work, but I often find myself wondering whether we could be doing better if I was capable of doing more. There’s an argument to be made that if there were dedicated “employees” engaged in the work of running the newsletter that we’d find more subscribers, but it’s incredibly hard to justify it from a place of sustainability. Maybe there’s hundreds or thousands of people out there who don’t know we exist and would pay to be a part of this community, but are they more likely to subscribe than the thousands of you who are on this mailing list but not yet supporting our work with a paid subscription? And would we risk the sustainability of this business model to chase them, knowing that any loss in revenue directly impacts my ability to support our team of freelance contributors?

I know you may not care about these existential questions facing culture journalism broadly, but the sustainability of this project is deeply important to me. At the end of every month when I pay our contributors, I think about what would happen if Episodic Medium were to go away. It’s a question of some of our writers’ ability to make a living doing this work, and a question of other writers’ ability to have the space to have their voice heard. Many of our contributors write elsewhere, including at my former home at The A.V. Club, but your subscriptions are actively supporting criticism that would not otherwise exist. If I didn’t start this newsletter a little over four years ago (I also didn’t have time for an anniversary post), and if you didn’t support it, think about the hundreds of reviews that simply wouldn’t exist.

Which is all to say that there is never a bad time to choose to support the work we do, because you get both the knowledge that you made this work possible and receive the single best value for a newsletter subscription I could imagine given that we haven’t raised our prices despite a dramatic expansion in our output since our first year. There are three ways you can help keep Episodic Medium sustainable into the future.

Monthly Subscriptions

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Yearly Subscriptions

This is the best deal for you as a reader and the best option for us as a business (both because it’s a larger investment in our work and because we only pay one credit card transaction fee). This is already a discount over the monthly rate, but in honor of our missed fourth anniversary, we’re offering your first year of Episodic Medium for $44, which will get you every review for the next twelve months. (Note: You need to click this button if you want the discount)

Loyal Viewer Subscriptions

If you feel like you’re in a position to contribute more, the Loyal Viewer tier ($100 a year or $10 a month) gives you the opportunity to join the Episodic Medium community in our Discord channel. Beginning this month, I’m expanding the offerings within the community with the new “Myles Watch” channel, where I’ll document everything I’m watching on a daily basis and offer brief reflections unless embargoes prevent me from doing so.

Regardless of your level of support, this newsletter only exists because of you, and I appreciate everyone who's ever been a part of this community over the past 4+ years. I also hope that the coverage we'll have on offer this summer is worth investing in.

New Coverage

As a general note, our coverage criteria remains widely subjective, although past experience has generally made binge releases and limited series much less likely to be covered, no matter how many Oscar winners and nominees the latter might collect (looking at you, Cape Fear).

Star City (Apple TV, May 29): This already started, but the For All Mankind spinoff represents one of two interesting experiments in spinoff storytelling in this summer schedule. Lily Osler will explore whether there’s enough story to be found in an alternate perspective on an alternate history through the show’s eight-episode first season.

The Vampire Lestat (AMC, June 6): I might find time for a newsletter about how Interview with the Vampire has been widely available across multiple streaming services during long hiatuses and still feels like it’s not part of the prestige TV conversation. But in the meantime, the rebranded return of the show during the summer months means we’ll join the conversation, with Emma Fraser covering the seven-episode third season.

Stuart Fails to Save the Universe (HBO Max, July 23): Look, regardless of how one felt about The Big Bang Theory and its subsequent prequels, there is something charmingly madcap about a multiversal single-camera spinoff for what might go down as the last blockbuster multi-camera sitcom. It’s the kind of risky experimental approach that spinoff logics support, and Donna Bowman will join Stuart on his journey into the unknown for the show’s first season.

Lanterns (HBO Max, August 16): Technically Peacemaker’s second season became the first canonical piece of the television side of James Gunn’s era of DC, but Lanterns is the first show to be exclusively developed in its image. The result is Kyle Chandler at the center of a True Detective/Slow Horses-inspired crime drama, which Liam Mathews will be covering at the end of the summer.

Returning Coverage

Rick & Morty (Adult Swim, May 24): This already returned, but it’s the coverage that’s most carrying over into the summer, so: reminder! 

House of the Dragon (HBO, June 21): For all our talk of the collapse of the Game of Thrones fandom, this is still one of HBO’s most-watched shows ever, and that’s not likely to change as the story continues to escalate in season three.

The Bear (FX on Hulu, June 25): We got a surprise Season 4.5 last month, an amuse bouche for a final season that I’ll cover across five reviews (Premiere, 3x two episodes at a time, Finale) at whatever pace makes sense given there’s almost certainly not going to be screeners.

Silo (Apple TV, July 3): I’ve already seen the entire third season of Silo, and while we’re very far away from any embargo lifting, I’ll be curious to see how non-readers respond to this season’s narrative focus.

Heartstopper Forever (Netflix, July 17): Reducing a final season of Heartstopper to a film continues to strike me as an assault on diverse representation on Netflix’s platform, but we’ll cover the end regardless as one of the first shows I started writing about in the early days of the newsletter.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (Paramount+, July 23): You’re going to see a lot of confusion with this, given that they already announced the show was ending, but that’s after the fifth season and this is only the fourth.

Ted Lasso (Apple TV, August 5): Someone on our Discord asked me if I would be subjecting myself to a fourth season of the show after expending a lot of energy dissecting the failures of seasons two and three, and to that I say “I ain’t no quitter.”

Calendars

Episodic Observations

• Note that currently Lanterns is still listed as an HBO Max show, despite launching on a Sunday like a traditional HBO show and starting the week after House of the Dragon ends. I presume this means it won’t be airing on the linear channels, but my guess is that that’s a very small minority of subscribers at this point, right?
• There’s theoretically some open slots in the schedule, especially as we get later into the summer, so as always there may be some additions.