Well, I'm pretty sure the episode 5x03 is called "The One Hundredth" for a reason...

Maybe you should rename that episode to "The Ninety-eighth" to match your numbers...

Thinking about it @karagian is right...why use that title if that episode is the 100th?

I repeat: I opened this discussion because I had doubts about the serie finale and maybe the season finale of the 9th season because on DVD/BD versions they are really united (I have to say that recently on Netflix I noted that the finale of season 9 is splitted over there).

I wasn't thinking to the other double episodes... but I try to hypothesize this two cases:

1) Maybe the producers of the show sold the episodes to nbc as splitted, then nbc decided to aired united making changes. 2) At that time they were effectively aired splitted by nbc but one after the other, and only the nbc's site indicates as they were together for convenience.

I think that sometimes, since we can't go back in time with a time machine to verify the real airing, we should follow the logics (as per the title gives to the 100th episode ... it's logic that it is the 100th episode and not the 99th).

On the other hand, who tells us that the official sites we use as official source are right or wrong? They may report inaccurate data too, no one is perfect.

@karagian said:

Well, I'm pretty sure the episode 5x03 is called "The One Hundredth" for a reason...

We are going as per the original broadcast.

If an episode have been originally broadcasted as one single episode and later split in 2 episodes, it should be listed here as one single episode.

@idro said:

1) Maybe the producers of the show sold the episodes to nbc as splitted, then nbc decided to aired united making changes.

In that case, the episode should be listed as one single episode, as the king is the original broadcast.

2) At that time they were effectively aired splitted by nbc but one after the other, and only the nbc's site indicates as they were together for convenience.

This is not the case here as we have an advertisement from the day of the broadcast, saying that this is an hour-long episode.

On the other hand, who tells us that the official sites we use as official source are right or wrong? They may report inaccurate data too, no one is perfect.

Unless we have an absolute proof that it is wrong, as per our rules, it is the king.

Season 7 and above are already confirmed as we have archives of the original site.

New snippets from newspapers of the broadcast day confirm that the following episodes have been broadcast as one single episode:

• season 4 finale
• season 5 finale
• season 6 "The One That Could Have Been"
• season 6 finale

But, new snippets from newspapers of the broadcast day indicate that the season 2 "The One After The Superbowl" episode has been broadcasted in 2 separate parts (here and here). I will do the necessary changes later today... Done.

Ok, I'll wait for these new changes, do you think they could be definitive or other researches on the web could be done in future?

Collapsing two episodes into one is affecting Trakt.tv in a very frustrating way. Everything gets messed up. «Friends» has 93 million plays on Trakt (438k watchers) and these recent changes has affected all of them.

Why not follow streaming and blu-ray releases instead of the original TV broadcast? It’s much more user friendly if TMDB keeps itself current, instead of being devoted to please enthusiasts who visit television libraries.

Why not follow streaming and blu-ray releases instead of the original TV broadcast? It’s much more user friendly if TMDB keeps itself current, instead of being devoted to please enthusiasts who visit television libraries.

I noted this is discussion is still open. Well, just referring to blu-ray or streaming unfortunately is not the correct way, because you cannot know the original support sources. Maybe who produced that Blu-ray decided to split the long original episode in two or more parts for convenience.

An example is here, where IMDB says that the Jeffersons episode originally aired as a 90-minutes episode and afterwards was splitted in three parts in syndacation versions.

The ideal would be know someone who works at the network and can access to the NBC/ABC/CBS archives of original tapes from that time, but it's a difficult undertaking. Me too I was in disagreement for long time with TMDB moderators with this thing, but in the end I understood that you have to rely on some data, and the only way is to trust to wayback machine or in the absence of it, to the newspapers of the time with a TV guide.

I have yet an open ticket on Trakt.tv site waiting for a resolution, but it is also true that we are just talking about 4 episodes to collapse, on a total of more than 200.