Month-to-Month: Episodic Medium's Summer 2025 Schedule

Month-to-Month is our quarterly-ish check-in on our schedule for the months ahead. Interesting in receiving all of these reviews in your inbox and joining the conversation, all the while supporting this independent and reader-supported publication? Yearly subscriptions are 10% off through July 1.

You may have noticed that Episodic Medium has entered an unplanned hiatus of sorts over the past couple of weeks: while our reviews of Rick and Morty and Poker Face have continued alongside reactions to Taskmaster, we’ve added no additional coverage over that period.

I suppose technically “unplanned” is the wrong word, since when setting the summer schedule I saw the gap forming. This is always the slowest time of year for the site, with every television distributor racing to finish their programming before the Emmy deadline at the end of May. We always see a wave of canceled subscriptions, which makes sense: people subscribed to read reviews of the blockbuster shows being pushed for Emmy consideration, and now those shows are over. Even ostensibly weekly shows that should have pushed into June based on their release dates were cut off early: Hacks doubled up some episodes, while we’ve talked extensively about the rushed Andor release schedule.

There were a handful of May premieres that I considered coverage for, but that ran into another problem: were any of them worth overextending the already broken May budget further? I watched the first half of Murderbot’s first season but felt the aggressively short episodes were limiting its impact; reviews of the second season of Nine Perfect Strangers seemed pretty middling; Adults released as a binge for inexplicable reasons (who is nominating it for Emmys?) despite airing two episodes weekly on linear; Duster probably would have gotten coverage if the budget wasn’t in the situation it was, but I’m not sure it would have withstood weekly coverage anyway. This isn’t even mentioning binge shows like Overcompensating or Dept. Q that rushed out their seasons in May, exactly at the time our schedules are packed with ongoing series. And while I have some thoughts about early June premieres like Stick, they weren’t thoughts that justified coverage.

Or more specifically, they weren’t thoughts that could justify coverage while I was otherwise occupied. Indeed, I’ve been largely absent from the newsletter over the past few months, mostly because my thoughts about the current landscape of television have been channeled into lectures being recorded for an online class on the television industry I’ve been building. What normally would have been a newsletter about the discourse around Overcompensating and Adults’ short eight episode seasons became part of a discussion of streaming’s impact on TV’s future; similarly, Netflix’s current effort to create variations on Yellowstone (Ransom Canyon, The Waterfront) became part of the continued dominance of recombinant logics within development even as broadcast becomes marginalized. Reactions and previews of our weekly coverage have meant that free subscribers have still seen plenty of Episodic Medium in their inboxes, but I’ll admit that circumstances precluded a more consistent critical voice.

I’ll make some quick reflections on some of these shows in the Observations section of this newsletter, and am happy to discuss further in the comments, but we’re really here to finally get summer started as new premieres close out the month of June.

New Coverage

Ironheart (Disney+, June 23): We still don’t entirely know what the release schedule is for this latest MCU series, but its first three episodes will drop this coming week, and Caroline Siede will be covering them with individual reviews on a daily basis. After being originally teased nearly three years ago in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Riri Williams finally gets her moment in the spotlight, although at a different point in the MCU timeline after the scheduling philosophy shifted at Disney+.

Dexter: Resurrection (Showtime, July 11): Look, I’m not saying that I approve of Showtime’s attempt to turn Dexter into a mutli-pronged franchise, but it’s a fascinating experiment, and this time around they’re going back to the source with Michael C. Hall returning to track Dexter cavorting with other serial killers and Peter Dinklage in New York City. Alex McLevy already took on Dexter Babies, so he’ll be back for another go-round.

Alien: Earth (FX, August 12): Easily the blockbuster show of the summer, Noah Hawley’s long-awaited and strike-delayed take on the Alien universe continues a trend toward TV extensions of major film franchises. I’ll be taking the reins to consider how the series balances its canonical ties with its presumed desire to function as an entry point to the universe.

Peacemaker (HBO Max, August 21): In a world of long hiatuses, Peacemaker’s three and a half years is right up there, but a lot has changed since then: once an extension of James Gunn’s sidequest after his exile from the MCU, it’s now a vital part of a Gunn-controlled DC Universe, with direct ties to July’s Superman. Liam Mathews returns to the rotation to lament the loss of TV’s raddest opening title sequence and evaluate its successor.

Returning Coverage

The Gilded Age (HBO, June 22): Donna Bowman’s reviews of the period drama return, as Julian Fellowes marches Carrie Coon & co. deeper into the 1880s.

The Bear (Hulu, June 25): As before, with screeners being reserved for a select group of critics, my coverage of The Bear will be on “Normal Person Time”: I’ll get a review of the premiere up on Wednesday, and will try to have an additional installment up over the weekend, but the rest of the coverage will come as I get to it.

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (FXX, July 9): Dennis Perkins did pop back in to discuss the Abbott Elementary crossover episode, which we’ll finally see the other half of, but he’s finally back full-time to explore the—*confirms the number*—seventeenth season of the long-running comedy.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (Paramount+, July 17): You may have been disappointed to read that they announced a shortened fifth and final season of this Trek spinoff recently, but it probably helps to remember this is only its third season, with a fourth full-length season already in production. It’s a weird discursive moment, but Zack Handlen will be back to chart the Enterprise’s latest adventures.

A Note on Episodic Reactions

We’re too far out on some of the premieres in August to know for sure what new or returning shows might warrant more short-form reactions and discussions, so stay tuned on this one. If there’s a new show you’re curious about and think it might deserve consideration, leave it in the comments as always.

A Note on Episodic Classics

Simple truth, here: I do not have enough time this summer to dive back into Lost, and so while there might theoretically be some space in the schedule, I’m going to hold off until I know I can really commit to consistent coverage before returning to review season five. Similarly, while the door is open for Latoya Ferguson to conclude her coverage of The O.C., we’re waiting on the right time for this to align with her schedule and ours.

Summer Sale

As always with a new schedule announcement, yearly subscriptions are onsale for 10% off our usual price—that means only $40 gets you a year of our coverage if you sign up by July 1. As always, I am very aware that your money is valuable, and that depending on how much TV you’re watching a subscription may not necessarily seem worth your money. But we really do depend on your subscriptions to make this feasible, and if you can afford to support us for the entire year, it really helps solidify our coverage and help us keep growing the site.

Calendars

Episodic Observations

• Let the record show that in the absence of new shows in early June, my boyfriend finally got his wish and we worked through one of his favorite shows, Syfy/Amazon’s The Expanse. I had started it a couple of years ago, but lost track of it, and we worked through seasons 2-6 in short order. It’s a good example of a show that wanted the scale of Game of Thrones in the mid-2010s, but without the budgets to go with it, but they make good use of their limited resources, and the shift in scale in the Bezos seasons helps the show pay off its worldbuilding. A fun binge if you haven’t gotten to it.
• Of the various May/June shows we didn’t cover here at the site, Dept. Q was the one that captured me most: it’s a really nice combination of a “forming a team” origin story and a contained procedural mystery, with an added layer of serialization in the shooting that opens the season. I don’t know that the red herrings of the whole affair totally pace out in a perfect way, but the story never loses momentum fully, and I’m definitely hoping we get a second season.
• I mentioned it above, but the 20-minute episodes of Murderbot drove me mildly crazy, and I can’t imagine watching it weekly—they’re clearly riffing off of classic adventure serials, but I don’t know if there’s enough substance in a given episode to feel worth a week’s wait. I binged this in two parts—Apple’s screening app broke for a month or so in-between—and I just don’t know why you make this 10 episodes instead of 6 given the scale of the story? Curious how people feel once the season ends in a few weeks.
• If we’re pitting Overcompensating and Adults against each other (as happened on my TikTok FYP), I found the former watchable if also temporally confused, and to be honest the latter just didn’t hook me in—I skipped to the finale to understand the TikToks and didn’t feel I missed a whole lot. I suppose this says something about my tolerance for Gen Z comedy, given that I gravitated toward the “Millennials play-acting as 18-year-olds” instead.
• I watched the entire first season of Stick, and it’s…look, it’s totally fine and passable, but it falls into some traps and its progressiveness is threatened by the clear conservatism in the show’s ethos. Wilson is charming, and I like an underdog sports story as much as anyone, but whether this coheres as a show is a matter of perspective. I’ll try to drop in for the finale.
• I watched a couple of Duster episodes ahead of a virtual press conference for the show, where I was able to ask co-creator LaToya Morgan about the workplace dynamics of the FBI side of the series, but got stalled by life. When I went back to check out the third episode, it began in medias res, and I was obviously not shocked to see other co-creator J.J. Abrams with a co-writing credit—the Alias flashbacks were very real. I have some flights where I’ll be able to catch up on some shows, and this is on my list.