Introducing Second-Run TV
Late to the discourse and loving it.
It’s time for an announcement! In September, I will be launching Second-Run TV, a paid series of newsletters focused on TV shows that are under-appreciated by all, under-seen by me personally, hard-to-find, or just gathering dust when they don’t deserve to be. In our speedy discourse, it’s easy to feel like if you missed a show while it was blowing up Twitter, it’s not worth going back to it. But there’s joy to be found in approaching TV shows without the discourse, as I have found in my recent rewatches of Girls and Mad Men.
Here’s the lineup:
September: On Becoming a God in Central Florida. Set in 1990s Orlando and starring Kirsten Dunst as a water park employee battling an MLM, this show had the misfortune of debuting during the pandemic. It never got a second season, though it was supposed to. I’m an avowed Kiki fan and MLM hater, so it needed to be included.
October: Harlots. Based on Hallie Rubenhold’s account of London sex workers in the 1700s, this show totally missed me when it first came out. I revisited it recently, and was delighted by the quality of the acting and the charm of the storytelling. Justice for Harlots!
November: I May Destroy You. I didn’t watch Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You when it first came out, because I just didn’t feel up for the subject matter: It’s about the aftermath of a sexual assault. But a sleeper hit is usually a good idea, and lord knows I’ve watched plenty of other shows that handle these stories with blunt-force stupidity. And you know what I am enthusiastic about? Michaela Coel. LFG!
After November, I might finish up the series with thirtysomething, the show about adults from My So-Called Life’s executive producers, and/or Early Edition, a supernatural journalism show (yes) starring Kyle Chandler, AND this lineup and timing is subject to change. But one thing that won’t is that this series will only be available to paid subscribers. So if you want to read it, you gotta subscribe!
And if there’s a TV show you love that you feel has been unjustly ignored, sound off in the comments, and I might include it!
The last time I did a subscription-only series it was really fun. Here’s the back catalog:
What I’ve been working on: For the primary election, I contributed to The Stranger’s live coverage of election night parties. You can read our whole report here. None of it is bylined, but I was at Gerry Pollet’s block party crawl and results-tracking party at a brewery off Lake City Way. Over the years, I’ve covered election night parties for the Mercury and The Stranger, and one year just directed traffic from the newsroom while our team went out to report. Last year, I edited election-night coverage for Crosscut from a friend’s house after a dance class. The upside to no longer being a news editor is getting to actually go out and talk to lawmakers before the stress of the legislative session reduces them to packed schedules and glassy-eyed stares. Welcome to the fun side of local politics! It also exists!
What I’ve been reading: Aisling Rawle’s speculative novel The Compound: The Love Island-meets-The Hunger Games conceit drew me in, and though I found the plot kind of flat and the prose kind of inert, I was surprised at how much I grew to like the narrator—a passive, very pretty twentysomething who is both a strategic game-player and kind of dumb. It is HARD to write a passive protagonist who actually compels, but I always root for a final girl, and while she gets off to a bland start, Lily is indeed the Jamie Lee Curtis of our age of voyeuristic TV and rampant overconsumption.
I’m also reading Emily Van Duyne’s Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation, which revisits Plath’s work through a lens of intimate-partner violence, with mixed results. I don’t love purely biographical readings of Plath’s work—she was incredibly intentional in drafting her poems, and taking them at diaristic face value feels flattening in its own way—and the feminist analysis, while a worthy project, feels a little stuck in 2017, but it’s a good text to pair with Heather Clark’s exhaustive, even-handed Red Comet, and I think worth reading for Plath completists.
I’m committed to seeing it through—I love reading about Plath in the summer; she was a big fan of beaches and backyard tanning—but I just don’t enjoy a book that casts Plath so heavily as a victim, when she exhibited so much agency during her real and remarkable life, and even at the very end of her life was writing brilliant poems and trying desperately to get help for her mental health, help that at the time was very hard to find. For a book about Sylvia Plath, much ink is also spilled on Ted Hughes, who, if you have read anything about Plath, you already know was A Problem.
Both of these books are going on my SPL Adult Summer Reading Book Bingo card. I ❤️ public libraries!
And speaking of misunderstood women: Lena Dunham and Alissa Bennett discuss Marilyn Monroe at Interview magazine; a more iconic duo does not exist. I also really appreciated Scaachi Koul’s incredibly reasonable take on (justifiable) concern for Ariana Grande’s health: “All the rest of us can try to do is stay free in our own bodies, in our unnecessary fears of weight gain, while the rest of the world reminds us how available it is to shrink. The hope is that her managers are corralling her offstage to provide her more-focused attention.”
A note about this newsletter: It hits your inbox every Thursday (or Wednesday if I’m feeling ambitious, or Friday if I’m not). Burbank Industries is just me, a reproductive health policy reporter and cultural critic at the dawn of the theocracy. Paid subscriptions make my reporting and commentary for each newsletter possible. Do the right thing if you can. (And if you can’t, let me know and I’ll comp you. Been there.)
Don’t want to subscribe through Substack? Pay any amount on Venmo and I’ll set you up with full access to the newsletter archives and new paid editions for 2026.
Playing you out: My toxic trait is that I watch the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders1 show, and I was surprised to see Kacey Musgraves show up in season 2, which reminded me that Kacey Musgraves exists, so I listened to Deeper Well for the first time while driving around on election night, and I love how cerebral and agnostic and woo woo and possibly on mushrooms (???) it is. Good for her!
I really appreciated that they finally explain in season 2 that the high kick technique placement is not the same as a grand battement in ballet. I did not appreciate the fact that this job requires so many hip-destroying jump splits and yet pays so little. NFL pay your cheerleaders challenge!
I really loved Early Edition, it’s where I first loved Kyle Chandler! My whole family loved it.
Oooo as someone who is just now watching The (original) L Word and dying to discuss, I love this idea!