Episodes is 10. Check out our new look!

At our November editorial meeting, Lily told me an astonishing fact: Episodes had turned 10 years old in August of 2025 without me even noticing. "Didn't it start in 2016?" I asked before Lily disabused me of that notion. Our very first edition (on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Hannibal) came out on August 31, 2015. That makes us 10 years, four months, and one week old, just old enough to sneak into a PG-13 movie largely unchallenged! Now, Episodes took several long hiatuses across those 10 years, but so did Bill Watterson, and that didn't stop him from publishing a Calvin & Hobbes 10th anniversary book. And just like Calvin & Hobbes, Episodes is a beloved American institution. So happy 10th birthday to us! A few months late!

In honor of our birthday and our soft relaunch, we're running a big sale. Get 20 percent off your first year of Episodes, paying just $40, rather than $50. And when you consider a full year of Episodes at the monthly rate of $5/month is $60 in total... it's an even better deal! Sign up below. This sale only runs through the end of January!

But wait! Did Emily say something about a soft relaunch? I sure did! Steadily across 2025, we bumped up the number of newsletters we published, especially for paid subscribers, and Lily came on board as managing editor to help build things out further. Mostly, we were doing this to see if it was at all sustainable, both economically and in terms of workload... because if it was, we wanted to push even further in 2026.

And here it is! 2026! We've got a bunch of exciting new things planned for the year, which I will get into the details on below, but we also want to refocus this newsletter on its core idea: talking about the smaller pieces of pop culture that get us obsessed with the larger whole. Whether it's an episode of a TV show you can't stop thinking about or a single shot in a movie that pulls everything into focus or a single song on an album that unlocks an artist for you, we want to write about that. There are plenty of other places that talk about the whole; we want to examine the parts and see what makes them tick. If you loved the ultra-nerdy stuff I wrote at The A.V. Club and Vox, this approach will hopefully be right up your alley!

Oh, wow, where did I put that birthday sale link?

Let's get into the details! What's going to make this new version of Episodes such a great deal? Well, here's just a little of what we have planned. (I'm also going to start referring to myself in the third person. It's easier for Emily to handle it this way.)

• We're seriously upping our publication schedule for premium subscribers. Free subscribers will still receive every other Wednesday's newsletter, previews of bigger premium pieces, and the occasional free-to-all post, but paid subscribers will soon get newsletters in their inbox four times a week (!) on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
• As part of this increased publication schedule, we'll be running Wednesday newsletters every week starting around the middle of January, with every other Wednesday featuring an exciting new feature from Emily (about which more in a second)! Only premium subscribers will have access to all of these; free subscribers will only get every other week's newsletter, as you have been for the last few years. Although, in the manner of HBO's old "preview weekends," we're going to be sending out several features that would normally only be available to premium subscribers to everybody across the next two weeks. So look out for those!
• Also of note: building off the success of Emily's recaps of Babylon Berlin, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Cowboy Bebop, and Andor (and Lily's recaps of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' third season), we'll be recapping new and interesting shows on the newsletter every Tuesday going forward! These recaps will start on January 13 with the first episode of Canada's taxpayer-funded phenomenon Heated Rivalry, aka the gay hockey show. Both Emily and Lily will be chatting about each episode!
• We'll be debuting new series of posts in the newsletter in the vein of Emily's late, lamented Kirsten and Natalie! (It will return!!) First up: On every other Wednesday, Emily will be doing articles on one great episode of television from every year of the 21st century so far, and in March, Lily will begin a read-along with this year's Tournament of Books.
• If you're one of the loyal handful of readers who click through from the newsletter to the website each week, you'll notice our fancy new site! The new theme should make it much easier to read posts by type (Rundowns, mailbags, etc.) and to explore our archives. Plus, now you can see who wrote each post right at the top of the page, which was somehow not possible with our old theme.
• Our archives are now fully tagged and much more easily searchable! Take a look at mailbags new and old (they go back to 2017!), riffle through all our old posts about cats or Buffy, or check out our thrilling, extensive 2 Broke Girls archive. We'll be putting a paywall over most of this archived content (excluding Stealth, which will always be free to read, and posts from the newsletter's time on Ghost) at the end of the month — another good reason to subscribe!
• And all of that is in addition to our usual perks for paid subscribers, like access to our Discord server (where both Emily and Lily chat regularly), the ability to ask questions in the monthly mailbag, and the ability to use the website's comments section!
• Finally: if you've subscribed to Episodes for a while (or, honestly, to any other newsletter written by a single person, no matter how committed), you may have noticed gaps in publication during times when Emily's had to step away for whatever reason. We're not about to declare this problem permanently solved, but having a clearer and more consistent schedule and another staff member to cover when one of us is away has already yielded results: Emily was on book leave in November and we still managed to publish at least two newsletters every week. Your subscription dollars help pay Lily, which is good. Lily also exists under capitalism!

SPEAKING OF TENUOUS EXISTENCES UNDER CAPITALISM! Everyone here at Episodes has a special place in our hearts for the times when Episodes was able to publish freelance culture writers regularly. Whenever we've talked about what we want from this new version of Episodes, "let's get freelancers back!" has always been the first thing one of us has said. And, with our newly increased publication schedule and our increased editorial capacity, we should be able to read more pitches, get notes out faster, and get pieces on the website more quickly and frequently than ever before.

But we need your help to get there! When Episodes published freelancers, we were hosted on Substack and Letterdrop, two platforms with business models that, while flawed, made medium-sized paid publications like this one relatively cheap to run. Unfortunately, Ghost (a lovely and pretty ethical hosting platform) is way more expensive than those two options; at the moment, we're breaking even, but we don't yet have the income to pay freelancers, which we consider a nonnegotiable for featuring their work. If even a few dozen free subscribers upgraded their subscription today, though, we'd be able to publish a freelance piece each month.

If you're a free subscriber and you want to see the return of freelance pieces, pick up a premium subscription today! If you're already a premium subscriber, consider gifting a subscription to a friend, loved one, or hated enemy who just can't stand pop culture analysis. If all goes well, we'll start publishing freelance pieces (including, much to Lily's delight, an occasional piece of FICTION!!) in late spring or early summer. (Freelancers, we'll announce a call for pitches prominently on the newsletter and website when we've figured out the financials, so keep an eye open!)

Wait, where was that link. It's somewhere around here... Hmm...

Okay. That's all the actual information. Now if you'll permit us a quick nostalgic slideshow, a la a high school graduation, Lily has prepared the following brief history of Episodes, which mostly amounts to a quick rundown of Emily's slow confrontation of her dissociation and ultimate healing process.

Take it away, Lily!

A brief history of Episodes, America's Favorite Newsletter®

Episodes 1.0: Ran from Aug 31 2015 to Jan 21 2016. In its earliest incarnation, Episodes was a Tinyletter (RIP!) newsletter written solely by Emily St. James. It ran every single weekday, except, per the footer, when Emily didn't feel like it. It only offered a free tier. (Emily: "Fun" fact: I started doing this because my Vox coworker Matt Yglesias did a couple of Tinyletters, I thought they were fun, and I didn't really care if I lived or died. Episodes is just another thing for which we can thank Matt Yglesias!!!!) Some great newsletters from this era include a really insightful take on Buffy's incredible season five finale, a write-up of the terrifying Max Headroom broadcast intrusion, and a definitive ranking of the musical moments in "Once More With Feeling". (Let no one accuse Episodes 1.0 of not covering Buffy the Vampire Slayer thoroughly.)

Episodes 1.5: Ran from Jan 25 2016 to Jan 18 2019. The same deal as Episodes 1.0, but, for very understandable reasons, running on a more manageable three-times-a-week schedule. Near the end of this edition, Episodes came out more irregularly; a single post appeared in 2018 and two appeared in 2019. It featured, among other things, great advice on writing criticism of visual media and a freelance pitch guide that I, Lily, still use to this day.

Episodes 2.0: Ran from April 1 2018 to Nov 4 2019, and, maybe more importantly, it wasn't actually called Episodes! This newsletter was called Stealth*, and it was written by Emily St. James under the pseudonym Emily Sandalwood. "You already know how to do this" and "Cardinal" are some of my fave newsletters from this era!

*But, Lily! I hear you protest. This was clearly not a version of Episodes! I'm beginning to question the seriousness of this list. Au contraire, my dear friend; in the first-ever full length post of Episodes 3.0, Emily wrote that her readers were, and I quote, "either subscribed to Episodes or Stealth. This newsletter will be an attempt to blend the two." Q.E.D.

Episodes 3.0: This edition of the newsletter ran from Oct 14 2019 to Dec 7 2020. It was the first regular newsletter venue for Emily's writing under her own name in a few years, since Episodes 1.5 had mostly gone radio silent after 2017 and Stealth was, as you'll remember, by the inimitable Emily Sandalwood. Episodes 3.0 marked the newsletter's first change of venue, from Tinyletter to Substack, and its first full-on intentional relaunch. The newsletter was free and was initially a weekly offering, but Emily added more editions as the Covid-19 pandemic wore on. This edition of Episodes had a bunch of firsts: most notably, it had the first show to get regular recaps (Babylon Berlin, my beloved), the first time Episodes published fiction (it's really good!!), and the first appearance of beloved Episodes contributor Emily Rogers.

Episodes 4.0: This edition of Episodes ran from Dec 9 2020-ish to Apr 7 2021-ish. (This is a difficult era to pin down from an archivist's point of view, for reasons that will be clear if you read through it!) While still on Substack, this version of Episodes featured two fancy new things: a paid premium edition of the newsletter and freelance contributors! As you'll note from the dates above, this version of the newsletter was very brief for this world, but it set the prototype for every version of Episodes to come. It was, alas, very brief for this world; Substack's upper management revealed themselves to be notably gross right-wing weirdos about three months after Episodes 4.0 launched.

Episodes 5.0: This edition of Episodes ran from Apr 9 2021-ish to Oct 31 2022. It ported over the thrice-weekly schedule, premium tier, and freelance contributors from Episodes 4.0, but it now ran on Letterdrop, a Substack competitor with a great product and a fair price scale (this is a literary device called "foreshadowing"). Episodes 5.0, after a year and a half, went on hiatus for a very pleasant reason: the birth of Emily's child. It saw the debut of The Bake Sale Bunch and a whole bunch of incredible freelance pieces; if you haven't yet, do yourself a figure and read some of those!!

Episodes 6.0: This edition of Episodes, which ran from Jul 3 2023 to Jan. 2, 2026, was the longest-running version of the newsletter to date. One major change was in hosting provider: Letterdrop, Emily's wonderful newsletter platform from the early 2020s, had during the hiatus pivoted to an inscrutable email marketing business model, thus necessitating a switch to Ghost. While Ghost was a platform with an actually sustainable business model and an easy-to-use CMS, it was also much more expensive than Episodes' previous homes, which meant that freelance pieces had to go on hiatus during this era. Episodes 6.0 ran twice a week, alternating free and premium editions, until the end of 2024; Monday Rundowns began on Jan 6 2025, bringing the number of newsletters weekly to three. Lily Osler (hi!) came on as the newsletter's managing editor on Sept 24 2025. During this time, Episodes' tenth anniversary came and went unacknowledged; this is because Lily forgot about it and Emily, quote, "kind of thought the newsletter started in 2016?"

Episodes 7.0: Hey, you're reading this one right now!

All right! That's enough of us! There's never been a better time to subscribe to Episodes, and we hope you'll give us a shot. Here's the sale again:

And if you're Episodes-curious but don't actually want to commit that much, being a free subscriber still gets you at least two free newsletters per month. You can sign up that way. We'll still like you.

We're excited for all 2026 has in store, and we're so thankful that you've continued to support and read this newsletter over the years. Onwards and upwards! To infinity and beyond! &c.

–Emily and Lily

A Good Song

The free edition of Episodes, which (usually) covers classic TV and film, is published every other Wednesday. Premium subscribers get newsletters every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday. Our editor-in-chief is Emily St. James, and our managing editor is Lily Osler. If you have suggested topics, please reply to the email version of this newsletter or comment (if you are a paid subscriber).