What is the Eternal Couch Potato?
In 2017, shortly after finishing graduate school, I started the biggest silly completionist project in my long history of silly completionist projects. The goal is to watch television history episode-by-episode, writing something about every publicly available show. Call it a tongue-in-cheek attempt to fight my own sense of FOMO, or a strange effort to chronicle postwar American culture on a granular, but I’ve found a lot of meaning in it over the years, as well as learned a bunch about puppets, Westerns, and a lot more.
This Substack is an attempt to expand on this project. If you love the Eternal Couch Potato, subscribing will help me have more time to write it, including the funds to pursue less available footage. If you like my writing but don’t care about reading my 77th Lone Ranger recap, subscribing will get you access to at least one premium post each week, in a variety of series. Here’s a breakdown of my plans for the newsletter:
Free Posts:
The Eternal Couch Potato classic: A breakdown of one episode of old TV, every Monday. This will always be free, and exclusive to this site.
Rob’s Ramblings: Essays every other Wednesday about whatever stirs my passions in pop culture, literature, or the news. These may be re-posted to Medium after a few months, but they will be here first.
Subscriber exclusive posts
Subscribers will get an additional, super-sized feature article every Friday. This will consist of a rotation between four series:
Flash-Forward - FLCL: Since it will take us a long time to get to some of the big-ticket series through the chronological method, I’ll let suscribers skip ahead to an exhaustive analysis of the anime classic FLCL and the ensuing franchise. This will always be exclusive to Substack, and exclusive to premium members until the day in the far future when I reach 2000 in my project (presumably as a brain in a jar.)
Comics and Literature - A Love Story: This is more of an academic-esque series on the history of “literariness” in comics, and how the desire to be literary influenced writers ranging from Art Spiegelman to Alison Bechdel with a whole lot of weird outliers in between.
Ogre Squire: If you’re interested in seeing me write fiction, this is for you. Ogre Squire is a mostly light-hearted fantasy story about an ogre who becomes the apprentice to a gallant knight and has to learn the way of the world. The story is inspired by a combination of the pulpy fantasy novels I loved as a teenager and the shounen battle manga I also loved as a teenager.
Postwar Days: An even more granular and completionist version of the Eternal Couch Potato, this takes a day-by-day approach to the English-speaking world after the conclusion of World War II. This will be a combination of history, criticism, and fiction, dealing with everything from pop music to presidential politics.
Subscribe to get full access to all of these features and publication archives.
Future plans
I may eventually publish the latter three features as e-books, but a subscription is the only way to get them first, as well as join in the discussion. I have tentative plans to expand the schedule based on the number of subscribers I get — I would love to be able to restore the classic ECP to its original biweekly format, and ultimately have a new post for you every weekday. I understand that there are a million newsletters, subscription services, and people trying to get you to give you money out there, so my goal is to work hard to provide incisive criticism, enjoyable fiction, and everything in between. I hope you enjoy the free posts and consider subscribing today.
