Episodes Monday Rundown June 8–14 2026

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The Monday Rundown is a weekly post talking about some of what the Episodes staff has been watching, reading, listening to, and playing in brief. It's for paid subscribers only and is a shameless ripoff of Fran Magazine's Sunday Dispatch.

Listening

you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love (Olivia Rodrigo, 2026): From the moment she broke through to the general populace in 2021, Olivia Rodrigo has garnered comparisons to Taylor Swift. Initially, those comparisons were ones she ran toward, seemingly with Swift's approval and appreciation, but across subsequent albums, Rodrigo has done her best to deemphasize her tweenage Swiftie backstory in favor of her wide and eclectic list of influences. She occasionally seems like someone who was sealed in a small room with the record collections of her parents and all their friends at the age of 6 — and I mean this as a compliment.

Alas, in news that will please no one, Rodrigo's new album — which is really fucking good — marks her as the single best heir to Swift's "people get parasocial about the way I use emojis in Instagram captions" crown. Like, it's so easy to imagine some of the songs on this album being beloved deep cuts Rodrigo pulls out in some enormous stadium tour in 15 years to the fervent cheers of people who aren't even born yet. It is, it brings me no joy to report, Rodrigo's Red, right down to having the exact same strengths and weaknesses, and it has at least three songs that might end up being her "All Too Well."

I put the album on to walk around Manhattan the other day, and I listened to it three times in a row, almost without thinking about it. The first time, I enjoyed it and really loved some of it, but it felt a little shaggy to me. In pop music — especially the hyper-personal pop Rodrigo specializes in — shaggy isn't always a problem. We want to feel like the singer is vomiting up her diary. It's what we've come for. Yet when the album came in for a landing with "cigarette smoke" ("All Too Well" candidate number one), I didn't get there quickly enough to switch to something else, and it looped back to the album's beginning with the wistful, hopeful "drop dead." And in that moment, the album rocketed up a couple of points in my estimation because it became so much clearer that it was an album that told one complete story from beginning to end in a way that gains complexity the more times you listen. Are there a few too many sad ballads? Yes, but this was also true of Red, and unlike on Red, every time you start to drag, Rodrigo pops in something like the New Wave-y "Expectations" to pep things up. What's more, the song isn't just there to break up the somber flow. It's a happy-sad song about trying to fuck someone new after a bad breakup that serves as a desperate counterpoint to the album's downward spiral.

That Rodrigo cares this much about album flow — and always has — in an era when the single is paramount speaks to just how out of time she feels and also why she seems to appeal as much to the parents of the kids who love her as those kids. But if both her prior efforts were solid efforts at crafting good album flow, this one is one of the best structured albums on a song-to-song level in ages and ages. Does every single song work independently? Not really. Do they all talk to each other so much that it becomes hard to imagine the album without any of them? Yes. Reportedly, Rodrigo thought about ditching "less," another down-tempo ballad in a long run of them, but I'm glad she kept it, both because it's one of the album's saddest songs ("All Too Well" candidate number two) and because its use of irony makes some of the other down-tempo ballads I like less work better.

Where Rodrigo has a leg up over Swift — especially at an equivalent point in Swift's career — is her psychological astuteness, which is kind of terrifying coming from a 23-year-old. you seem pretty sad gives the unnamed guy who broke Rodrigo's heart (assumed to be Louis Partridge) a lot of shit, but Rodrigo saves more than enough ammunition for herself, her depressive tendencies, her need to find someone to fix her when only she can do that. Like, that was already evident from "the cure" (which can't be an "All Too Well" candidate, as it's a single, but you never know), and the full album makes it even more obvious. Even more impressive, she lands in a space where she can step back and admit not that the relationship was doomed, per se, but that it might have given her something she needed at one point in her life, then stopped offering her that at another. There's a lot of year left, but this is going to be on my year-end favorites list for sure.

("All Too Well" candidate three is "begged," but I hope it's not this one because while I like it, the other two are much better.)

(I also like that Rodrigo can be so bratty. I love how she says, "That's it! I win!" on the "oh, this relationship is falling apart" song "my way." There's a song named "maggots for brains"!) —Emily St. James

Watching

Ragtime (The Vivian Beaumont Theater, 6/14/2026): Ragtime is legitimately a pretty important production in the artistic development of one Emily St. James. I became obsessed with the original production sight unseen, to the degree that I read the E.L. Doctorow novel it's based on, to the complete bafflement of my high school English teacher. This is sort of embarrassing to admit, but having grown up in such a cloistered environment, the novel and musical were some of the first real sledgehammers against the great American mythos I had been taught.

Anyway, the new production of the musical at Lincoln Center — running through mid-August — is a truly staggering thing. It's hard to do Ragtime well without an enormous ensemble cast and an enormous orchestra, and this production offers both, a vivid reminder of just how much power any one show can gain from having an enormous collection of humans making music together. It's perhaps worth seeing for the opening number alone, a bit of which you can see in this Tony Awards performance.

The show has a bit of that late 20th century "Gosh, we've come so far since the days of racism!!" attitude sticking to it, but there was always less of that in Ragtime than in many contemporaneous treatments of American prejudice. And this production has done its level best to underline the ambiguity always present in the text, the idea that the forces that lead to this story's explosive conclusion have always been — and will always be — present in American society. I really hope this production was captured for PBS's Live from Lincoln Center (if the funding for that program still exists) because there deserves to be a really good, accessible record of it. It's a great show, arriving at a moment when it couldn't feel more timely. —ESJ

The 79th annual Tony Awards (CBS): Good show! Pink a good host! Lots of good productions rewarded! Really sad I didn't get a chance to see Cats: The Jellicle Ball but maybe next time I am in THE CITY! —ESJ

The Boroughs, episodes 6 through 8 (created by Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews, Netflix, 2026): Good! I have no idea how they had the music budget to play "Thunder Road" three times (granted, one time as performed by Alfred Molina), then "Born to Run" over the finale's closing credits, but of course this sort of post-production question is one I would get hung up on. Overall, I found it a winning show about aging gracefully and overcoming one's fear of death, and if the emotional beats could be a little easy, well, the cast more than made up for it. The finale even went to some places that were a bit more profound than I expected. I dearly hope it gets a Season 2! —ESJ

The first two-thirds of Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2025, dir. Matt Johnson, 2026): I had essentially no time for movies/music/etc. over the last week — my wife and I said we were going to try and take it easy on our honeymoon in Copenhagen, then we immediately disregarded that plan and ran ourselves (gleefully) ragged trying to see the entire town over four and a half days — so I told myself that I would watch a bunch of movies on the flight back. Unfortunately, ten-ish hours of walking a day caught up with me the instant I reclined my seat and I woke up with just enough time to watch Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie in its entirety. As I was navigating to the movie, though, I found out that the in-flight entertainment system had 2048 on it, so that ate up a good half an hour.

The 65 minutes of this I saw were really good, though! Definitely more of a smirk-and-nod comedy than an audible-laughter one, but I was probably too sleepy for anything else. I couldn't find it on streaming and am feeling too cheap after my Big Vacation to pay for a rental, so I'll just have to hope they make it back from 2008 okay in the film's remaining runtime. —Lily Osler

Reading

All Us Saints (Katherine Packert Burke, 2026): This book kinda knocked me out. I can quibble with some of the choices here and there — the conclusion feels a touch overdetermined to me — but the overall scope of what Burke is doing more than makes up for the moments when I was, like, "This is a 9 out of 10 instead of a 10 out of 10."

Burke's subject is the St. Cloud family of suburban Virginia (unspecified town). In the early 1990s, one member of the family — referred to throughout as a twin brother but almost certainly a twin sister, since she was probably trans — killed three teenage girls and also stabbed their twin. Now, the family lives in the tomb of that moment, unable to acknowledge the killer who was among their DNA. The story takes place on two separate long nights, anniversary "celebrations" of the night of the murders, as the family gathers to play out a long ritual of that night of death, then stay awake until dawn. Burke, who is trans, is very smart about digging into the thorny roots of the "transsexual killer" trope, and she manages to dissect horror films, true crime stories, and the ways we talk about trans people, all while largely keeping the killer offscreen. (We do get an arresting and memorable section from their point of view at one point.)

Mostly, this is a book about how a family that will not acknowledge one of its members — or the ways all of its members ignore the pain of the other members — is doomed to fester away in isolated purgatory. I complained slightly about the conclusion, but it's also the only place the story can ultimately go. Someone needs to open things up for everyone to move forward. –ESJ

Experiencing

The Sophie Calle exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (outer Copenhagen region, Denmark): We went to this after a long walking tour of Kronborg Castle (you might know it as Elsinore from Hamlet!!) without having had much food or water, so I was tired, thirsty, and physically a complete wreck when we finally stumbled into the Louisiana Museum around midafternoon. All of which to say: thank God for Sophie Calle, a conceptual artist whose work revitalized me in a way that feels almost spiritual!

Calle is an autobiographical artist whose work — photos with very long captions, descriptions of performance pieces, that sorta thing — is tender and precise in how it explores beauty, love, and death. The museum's website highlights two of her works that seem in concept kind of like 2014 Upworthy videos (blind people describe their idea of beauty, people who've never seen the ocean have their reactions filmed when they finally go to the seashore) but that are in fact very specific and understated in a quintessentially French and very moving way.

What I found even more gorgeous, though, was a room filled with Calle's unfinished artistic projects from her decades-long career. Each one, stamped with the reason it was never completed, was filed alongside its residual material: letters to collaborating artists, archived photos, mock-ups and prototypes. What struck me seeing this room at the end of the exhibition was realizing just how much material from her unfinished work had been transformed into parts of the artworks we'd just walked past. The failures tightened her thematic focus and gave her inspiration for new ways to use the tools she'd learned in attempting them. It's one thing to know in the abstract as an artist of any kind (a writer, say!!) that every attempt teaches you something, no matter what it leads to. It's another entirely to see so much evidence laid out on tables for you to peruse. —LO

Losing a Lambda Literary Award but learning to love the New York Knicks by coincidentally being in Manhattan when they win their first championship in 53 years (Emily St. James, New York and environs, 2026): Look, I was out trick or treating last year when the Dodgers were playing a must-win game in the 2025 World Series. (They won.) I saw the TVs set up for the kids, got updates from the other parents. It was an expression of how much camaraderie there is in the city I've called home for much of my life.

But damn, there's nothing like being in New York when a New York team is doing a sports. I don't even care about the Knicks, and I got swept up in the fervor, wandering from Penn Station southward, then doubling back to Central Park to watch part of the game at Wollmann Rink. World Cup attendees, in the city from points all around the world, found themselves similarly swept up in the action, and when the Knicks won, we were all fans.

Anyway, I also lost an award, but that was fine! I lost to a good book, and I gained something even more important: the New York Knickerbockers. —ESJ

A Good Song

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