Meet Episodes' new managing editor

If you have been religiously reading this newsletter the last few months, you've noticed Lily Osler's byline cropping up a lot more in addition to mine. She's written about Hollow Knight and Sabrina Carpenter, seed art and Star Trek. She's a big part of why the newsletter has been able to keep going while I've been in some severe deadline crunches. She's a smart, witty writer who really reminds me of myself in her willingness to chase down weird pop culture tangents at a moment's notice.

If you've also been carefully reading the boilerplate text at the end of every edition (and you should be), you'll notice that last week, she gained the title of managing editor.

This newsletter is meant to make that title official for all the heathens who don't read the boilerplate every week! Lily Osler is the managing editor of Episodes! She's going to be taking on a lot of the editing load here, as well as doing quite a bit of writing. I'm about to disappear into another book (the It's a Wonderful Life tome), and instead of taking the whole newsletter dark, with Lily's help, we should be able to keep to our schedule, with possibly a few weeks skipped in the midst of crunch time. (We'll try to let you know in advance.) Once I'm out from under this deadline, we're going to work to get the newsletter back to a place where it's pushing out three editions every single week, then start to come up with some other fun stuff for paid subscribers. Our hope is to make this a slightly more coherent publication, with a mission statement that makes some sort of sense, while still allowing for the occasional fake recipe blog.

I asked Lily for comment, and she said:

Thank you, Emily, for this opportunity, and to Episodes’ readers for giving my work (read: my escalating derangement around Star Trek: Strange New Worlds) a chance these last few months. I’ve been an Episodes reader since two or three newsletter platforms ago, and this role is an absolute dream come true. I’m honored and excited to have the chance to write and edit for Episodes, to help shape the newsletter’s direction and voice, and to spend more time on our premium subscribers-only Discord server with all you lovely people even though I find Discord somewhat frightening and strange. (It tried to get me to buy something called Orbs last time I logged on??) Here’s to the future of Episodes, and to Emily letting me have an audience with Emily Rogers at some point if the time-space continuum permits.

Episodes is in a weird place! We're financially solvent – in that the money we make from subscriptions covers the expenses of running the newsletter – but we're not successful enough for us to be able to make this even a secondary source of income. Pushing the publication to that next level will require putting in the work, and I'm so glad Lily's going to be helping me in that endeavor.

To that end, please welcome Lily! And once you've done that, we'd love to hear what you would like this newsletter to cover more frequently. My day job of writing television ties my hands in certain ways when it comes to writing forthright criticism, but Lily's hands are not similarly tied. Moreover, there are always other ways to write about film and TV than simply covering the new releases. Please drop a line below and let us know!

In Lily and my preliminary conversations about what this newsletter could look like in a year or two, I've become really excited about some of our ideas. I'm looking forward to the future of this newsletter, and I hope you'll continue to read for years to come.

Obligatory "become a paid subscriber" button to follow.