TV Calendar: Keeping on top of Substack

I like TV! For a while I wrote a Substack about TV, and I've recently brought that back.

With one issue. See, I have specific filters I use for deciding what shows to post about. They're usually American, and they have to have aired on one of the major streaming platforms (Excluding Netflix). They must also be in the English language, and I only want to watch the series premiere - not returning series.

Simple, right? Trakt.tv was my go to - spend £16/year on a subscription for a calendar view that synced to my Gcal, everything is great.

Except that Trakt.tv sold its soul to the devil, and I'd be better off smearing mud on my face than using their website anymore. So I look elsewhere - Simkl sounds promising, next-episode.net, maybe. Except that they're both awful, and both need subscriptions. I will not settle!!

So I had a think. Where did Trakt get its data from? Well, turns out it's from TMDB, and TMDB has an API. Cue Claude Code.

The writing was never the bottleneck — the calendar was. A show’s finale is the one moment people want to read about it, and I kept finding out about that moment two days late, from someone else’s post.

So I built the boring version of the fix. Air dates for everything I’m following flow from a TV metadata source into a single calendar, and each episode arrives as an event with the show, the episode number and a link back to my notes. A second automation walks ahead of that calendar and creates a draft in my writing app a few days before anything worth covering airs, pre-filled with the show name, where I left off, and the questions I had after the last episode.

The decision that made it work was refusing to build a dashboard. I do not need a view of my content pipeline; I need a draft sitting in the place I already open every morning, with the first sentence already impossible to avoid. Everything else in the system — tags, statuses, backlogs — got deleted after the first month because I never once looked at it.

The rig is deliberately unclever about failure. If the metadata source is wrong about a date, the event is wrong and I fix it in the calendar like any other appointment; nothing cascades. If I ignore a draft, it stays a draft and quietly stops nagging. Automation that can only ever suggest is much easier to live with than automation that assumes.

What it changed: I now publish against the television schedule instead of behind it, and the week’s writing decisions get made on Sunday rather than every evening. What I would build next: a view of the season ahead, so I can choose to skip a show early rather than discovering in week six that I have nothing left to say about it.