Mikhail's TV Digest #19 Sums Up a Slow Period
October 2024 Posts
This is the 19th issue of what is typically an ongoing monthly-ish series that I like to call Mikhail’s Textual Variations Digest, aka MTVD, for short. It includes links to my recent posts, as well as some additional related thoughts and notes.
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The Digest
October 1
This is a guest post I wrote for the amazing publication, where I talked about what were to me some obvious changes that happened between the first and second seasons of the Amazon Prime Video series Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
It came about after I saw the second season premiere, which opens with an extended flashback showing the ‘origin’ of Halbrand (Charlie Vickers), the guise the villainous Sauron appears under throughout the show’s first season. Having previously written an extended post on the secret Sauron backstory that S1 had hinted at, I was surprised at how much the flashback seemed to be retconning and contradicting what was previously established.
To avoid potential content duplication issues, I made the decision to keep this post exclusive to JwT but shared it exclusively with my subscribers here via email. If you’ve missed the email or didn’t receive it, please check it out now by clicking on the image above.
October 10
One of my long-term projects is a multi-part series of critical essays on The Matrix franchise. I originally intended it to be a 5-parter that would’ve focused largely on the sequels, allowing me to put to paper some thoughts and perspectives that I’ve had for close to 20 years. But over time, it expanded, as I realized there was a lot I needed to say about the first film before I could really dive into Reloaded, Revolutions, and (as of December 2021) Resurrections.
Initially, I wanted to publish the different articles composing this series across Medium and Substack, as I’d assumed this would help boost the project’s overall visibility. I later realized that it’s best to focus everything on one site, but by that point, I’d already placed two posts on Medium, where they continue to be among my most well-read pieces.
As I’m hoping to keep those two posts on Medium for the time being, I decided to make a custom guide menu that links to all the parts of the retrospective in one place.
October 22
I’d been seeing notes in my feed by fellow pop culture writers expressing the desire for a ‘Film & TV’ category for quite a while now. It’s something I myself have lobbied for, as I knew that there was at least 100 different publications devoted to the topic.
About a month or so ago, I started seeing references to a ‘Movie & TV” category in fact being available, even though it did not appear in my interface. Then it did show up only to inexplicably vanish alongside other new categories like ‘horror.’
Thankfully, I had bookmarked it before it went away and decided to make a writeup to make sure more people were aware of it. The response I’ve gotten so far has been amazing. I’m hoping this helps convince Substack to make it a permanent category!
October 29
This is a piece that I began writing earlier in the Summer but couldn’t quite finish until recently. Like many of my articles, it ended up growing in the telling. The second half of it, where I offer my theories about why the R-rated Pacific Heights appears in a re-edited, cable-friendly edition on Prime Video, was in particular hard to get right, as I had to deal with conflicting pieces of evidence and couldn’t offer concrete answers.
I hope the post sheds light on the issue of censorship in the age of streaming and ultimately leads to more transparency on the subject.
Overall, this was a relatively slow period, as I’ve been easing back into a regular writing schedule following the Summer disruption. Assuming everything goes to plan, I will have finished a couple of big articles before the year is over and revamped my film & TV newsletter directory, allowing me to update it again.
In any case I hope to have a more consistent output this month and the next.