What's up for Episodes in 2022

In 2021, I embarked upon the perhaps too-ambitious (okay, definitely too-ambitious) plan of publishing three newsletters per week. One edition each week was free, and the other two were only available to subscribers. About a week after making that announcement, my mental health completely fell apart, which should have probably been a sign that I should scale back my ambitions.

Subscribers have surely already noticed, but the Friday and Wednesday newsletters have mostly melded together. My brain just didn't have the space to write a Monday newsletter and a Friday newsletter every week, especially as my life became busier in other ways. And in weeks when one of the freelancer-contributed newsletters required a little more time, the whole system might shut down.

Something has to change, so here is the plan for 2022.

Every other Monday newsletter will be free to everyone, starting next week. The January 17 edition will be the second installment of Kirsten and Natalie. Many of my weirdest features (including the Emily Rogers and Bake Sale Bunch posts) will continue to be part of the free newsletter.

Starting January 24, I will be writing recaps of TV series of interest on alternating Mondays, beginning with the original Cowboy Bebop. These recaps will only be available to subscribers.

Every Friday, I will publish a newsletter by a freelancer on a cultural topic of interest. If you think that might be you, please email me pitches at episodes.pitches@gmail.com. (Also, I'm sorry, but you have to be eligible to work in the U.S. because my taxes this year are wacky.) But beware: I am a harsh editor. (I am kidding. I am a totally normal editor. I think. Freelancers sound off in the comments.) The Friday newsletter is only available to subscribers, and I will publish the first one of 2022 this upcoming Friday.

These changes will help me keep a more consistent publishing schedule, unless my life completely goes off the rails again. (And it might!) Again, I thank you for reading this newsletter, and I invite you to use this edition to post some comments about what you might like to see me tackle in the new year. I promise to listen to them half-heartedly.

Yours,

Em

Talk back to me: If you have ideas for the future of this newsletter, post them in the comments! I'll at least read them.

What I've been up to: It's been a second since I shared my Vox work here, and there's been a ton of it. So I'm not going to link to all of it, especially since I shouted out the Matrix trauma piece in last week's newsletter. But you should check out my thoughts on the Succession finale and HBO Max's Station Eleven and the best TV shows of 2021.

Any given series being lost amid the never-ending onslaught of new releases is completely understandable. I get why director Barry Jenkins’s astonishing adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel seemingly evaporated the instant it was released. There’s too much stuff!
Yet the fact that Prime Video seemed almost to treat this tremendous work — the best TV series I’ve seen in years and years — as an afterthought continues to frustrate me. Yes, a 10-episode miniseries about slavery and the ways it paints every single element of life in the United States with its poisoned brush to this day was always going to be a tough sell. But Prime Video didn’t even seem to try.

Read me: Everybody loves Lauren Wilford's review of Licorice Pizza, and everybody includes me! It's great.

A warm tribute to a kind of relationship I feel like lots of us have stuffed way in the back of a mental drawer: the ill-advised crush turned briefly, oddly, achingly mutual, transmuted not into a romantic relationship but into an ambiguous, charged entanglement.

Watch me: It says something about how wonderfully I have cultivated my friend group that fully six or seven people sent me this video essay on Garfield's intersection with the internet, the nature of horror, and the endless suffering of Jon Arbuckle. It's really good!

And another thing... I'm rather obsessed with this Kickstarter for a role-playing game about the Bible, set in the year 26 C.E. and featuring giants and nephilim and stuff. The FAQ page features the phrase, "At the end of the day, Christian or Atheist, what we really want when we sit down to play an RPG with our friends is to battle an ancient demon at the top of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon."

Opening credits sequence of the week: I only did the boilerplate sections this week to share my recent Vox work and the opening credits for Half Nelson, a detective show starring Joe Pesci. Even if you never watch the opening credits sequences I share here, I insist you watch these.

A thing I had to look up: Nothing. I got this one 100 percent right.

This week's reading music: "Tomorrow May Not Be Your Day" by Taj Mahal

Episodes is published twice per week. Mondays alternate between a free edition on various topics and a subscriber-supported edition where I recap TV shows of interest. Fridays offer pop culture thoughts from freelance writers. The Friday edition and the biweekly recaps are only available to subscribers. Suggest topics for future installments via email or on Twitter. Read more of my work at Vox.