Candy Shorts New Episodes: 8 Series With Fresh Drops, Timed

Logged by Cole Marchetti Published September 24, 2026 Catalog surveyed September 24, 2026

What the badge is, and what it isn’t

New Episodes is a label Candy prints on library cards, not on individual episodes. It shows up as a red corner tag on the cover, spelled out in full on a desktop screen and shortened to New Eps on a phone. On September 24, 2026 it sat on 10 series out of a library of 120. Candy’s tag filter has a matching entry called new, and it returns exactly the same 10 series, so the badge and the filter are one list wearing two hats.

What the badge does not tell you is when anything was added. There is no date on the card, no date on the series page and no date in the episode list. Candy’s landing page promises weekly new episodes, and the badge is the only visible trace of that promise. So I log the badge on each survey date and let the difference between surveys tell the story, rather than inventing release dates I never saw.

There is one more trace, if you are willing to read addresses. Candy gives every series an internal number, and those numbers climb as new series are created. The badge-wearing series hold the highest numbers in the library, 280 through 288, plus a single outlier far down the list, YES MA’AM at number 82, whose episode list runs all the way to fifteen. That pattern suggests the badge marks recently built series and, in YES MA’AM’s case, a long run that keeps growing. It is an inference from the numbers, not something Candy states.

The eight I list, one by one

Two of the 10 badge wearers are left out under the house rule, the first for its university campus and the second for placing a stepson under a 22-year-old stepmother’s supervision. The other eight follow, newest number first.

The Maid My Wife Hired, number 288

The newest series in the library by Candy’s own numbering, and the quietest opening of the badge group. A wife hires a maid, tells her husband to be nice and that she will be back at eight, and leaves. The free pair runs 2:11 and carries just 10 cues in episode one; the rest is a remade coffee, a remark about dust and a lot of pointed housework. Episode two ends on the best line of the batch, the maid observing that the house is spotless and he is the last dirty thing in it. Locks cost 12 tokens. Yuna Moon plays the maid, her third turn in service roles.

My First Night Shift, number 286

A new night manager at an old hotel discovers that room service is part of the job and that every room has an order to fill. 2:01 free across two episodes, 15 cues in the first, and a premise that resets itself every time a phone rings at the front desk. It is structured like a hotel farce: a strict colleague called upstairs, a guest in room 808 who didn’t call because she was hungry, a dessert plate that is not really a dessert plate. Clean on dialogue, which makes the setups land harder. 12 tokens a lock.

Bonnie Blue is My Stepsister, number 285

The only creator series among the new arrivals, and it gets its own page on Bonnie Blue’s creator sheet. The short version: a stepbrother, a famous houseguest and a running joke about a number. 1:58 free, which is short for the price, because the locks cost 30 tokens each, the creator rate.

My Neighbor’s Husband Works Nights!, number 283

A new tenant fixes something in the apartment across the hall at three in the morning and meets the couple who live there. The husband asks him to keep an eye on his wife, because he works nights. The free pair runs 2:15 and episode one packs 25 cues, second only to Date With My Stepmom among the badge wearers, with episode two built entirely around a shower head that somebody seems to have loosened on purpose. It also leads my Frame Score table on this survey. Simona Rossi plays the wife. 12 tokens a lock.

My Father’s New Queen, number 282

The most ambitious premise in the batch: an old king marries a 22-year-old, the court makes his son of the same age kneel to his new stepmother, and on the wedding night the new queen skips the royal chambers and knocks on the prince’s door. Episode two turns it into a spy story. At 1:53 it is the shortest free pair of the eight, yet it speaks 221 words, second only to YES MA’AM in the group, and it gets its whole court intrigue across in two minutes. 12 tokens a lock, and Aubrey Vaughn in the lead.

Claimed by the Dragon Queen, number 281

A prisoner is chosen as a dragon queen’s newest plaything and told that the last three were never seen again. 2:13 free, with a queen who insists on hearing her own name and a court that treats the prisoner as nobody in public and something else in private. It is one of the few series in the library whose player links no chat profile for its lead, and its first episode holds a nine-second silent tail at the end, one of the three longest closing shots in the whole library. 12 tokens a lock.

Date With My Stepmom, number 280

A husband cancels dinner, and his wife ends up at home, dressed for a dinner that is no longer happening, alone with his 20-year-old son. The free pair runs 2:06 and episode one has 26 cues, the most of any badge wearer, most of them the son’s inner voice explaining, at length and with feeling, why he should not be looking. Episode two opens with her letting him know she heard every word. It is a one-room two-hander, and the writing carries it. 12 tokens a lock, no chat profile linked.

YES MA’AM, number 82

The veteran of the group and the longest run on the page: fifteen episodes, two free, 13 locked, 156 tokens to finish. A recruit on his first day of basic training draws the attention of a commanding officer who is married to the colonel who runs the base. Diana Demont leads, in the first and best of her three chain-of-command series. The free pair runs 2:15, and episode one waits ten seconds before anyone speaks, a rare patient opening in a library that usually talks inside the first second.

How the new batch compares

New does not mean longer. The eight listed badge wearers average a little over two minutes of free running time, below the library’s overall average of 2:19, and none of them reaches the three-minute free runs at the top of the free minutes table. They are also cleaner in the mouth than the library as a whole: across the free pairs, the eight badge wearers use well under one explicit word each on average, and five of them use none.

They do carry more subtitle languages. Seven of the eight ship Japanese as a seventh subtitle track alongside English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, which only the most recent productions in the library do; YES MA’AM, the veteran of the group, has the older six. If you watch with Japanese subtitles, the newest shelf is the one built for you.

And they are cheap to finish, with one exception. Seven of the eight lock their episodes at 12 tokens, so a five-episode badge wearer costs 36 tokens to complete. The exception is the creator series, at 30 tokens a lock.

How I would watch the new shelf

Start with My First Night Shift and The Maid My Wife Hired back to back. They are the two cleanest, most efficient openings in the batch, and between them they show you the house style for the newest productions: a one-line premise, a location with doors, and a sense of humor. Then take My Father’s New Queen for something with a plot. If all three leave you wanting episode three, a single month of Premium covers two of them end to end.

How I track the badge between surveys

Because Candy publishes no dates, the only honest way to follow new episodes is to compare surveys. On each survey date I record every series wearing the badge and its episode count. A series that gains the badge between two surveys is a new arrival or a revived one; a series whose episode count grows is getting new episodes, whatever the badge says; a series that loses the badge has simply aged out of Candy’s idea of fresh. YES MA’AM is the one to watch on that score. It already runs fifteen episodes, and if the next survey shows sixteen, that is a real drop rather than a label.

I also keep the free-pair clocks from every survey, so if Candy ever recuts an episode, the running time will show it. This page reflects the first survey in the log, so there is no earlier count to compare against yet; the next survey is where movement starts to show.

The badge moves, so this page moves with it. When a series loses the badge it drops off this list and stays in the log with everything else.