Looks like Season 31 as well, I guess it depends on how people want to split them. Thoughts?

Yeah I was folling PBS website for seasons... This episode is listed as Season 2013 Episode 8. I had it under Season 13 (from TVDB). TMDB says it's Season 31.

https://www.themoviedb.org/tv/4384-frontline/season/31 https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/retirement-gamble/

Very strange. I wonder also how IMDB and others sorts the Frontline series.

Similar issues across the discussion board it seems: https://www.themoviedb.org/tv/4384-frontline/discuss/5fd92a9d511d0900415ebbd1

Some episodes seem to be missing from the 'official' listing on the PBS website. For example, "Poor Kids" aired during the gap between the final "Season 2012" episode on 11/12/2012 and the first "Season 2013" episode on 01/08/2013. I don't know what the authoritative source should be, but it seems like the "official" source is not sufficient.

Currently, different TMDB seasons have information from different sources. It's a bit of a mess, and the only episode I want to scrape is being squeezed out by a misalignment of sourcing for seasons 30 and 31. Wikipedia seems like it's probably the most complete source at this point.

I just undid a bunch of misguided edits that I started in order to address my problem. For now, I think I'll just wait until the dust settles.

I'm happy to help organize these, but as with radiopayola, I'm reluctant to touch anything without a consensus. It seems to me that the season breaks on wikipedia make the most sense, if we're not going to use the strictly year based seasons on the official site, but I'm new here, so I'll of course defer to others on this. As it is, the season breaks we're using here seem to be inconsistent -- some seasons start with the year, as per the PBS site, some align with the traditional fall TV season, as per the wikipedia page. Some of the seasons overlap (e.g. The last 4 episodes of S28 are the first 4 episodes of S29). In addition, some of the seasons are not numbered by airdate. I may well be missing something and this is intentional, so please let me know if so.

The Frontline website[0] seems to index only things that have videos available, but a google search for the episode title will frequently find pages that are not listed there. For example, the original version of Poor Kids is now listed on their website[1] as an extra for the updated 2019 version. The lack of an entry for this original airing of Poor Kids seems to have been fixed, but there are many like it -- Storm Over Everest, for example, does not show up on the Frontline website because of a copyright claim (it was also released as a documentary independently of the Frontline airing), and there's not an entry for it here.

Some episodes that do not seem to be currently listed are the following (with air dates from the PBS site, the old year based Season numbers, and the new season/episode numbers according to wikipedia):

2008-05-13 https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/everest/ S2008E09-Storm_Over_Everest.mp4 S26E13-Storm_Over_Everest.mp4

2008-06-17 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/youngchina/ S2008E10-Young_and_Restless_In_China.mkv S26E14-Young_and_Restless_In_China.mkv

2012-10-09 https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/choice-2012/ S2012E22-The_Choice_2012.mkv S31E01-The_Choice_2012.mkv

2012-10-23 https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/climate-of-doubt/ S2012E23-Climate_of_Doubt.mkv S31E02-Climate_of_Doubt.mkv

2012-11-13 https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/suicide-plan/ S2012E25-The_Suicide_Plan.mkv S31E04-The_Suicide_Plan.mkv

2013-04-30 https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/topsecretamerica/ S2013E08-Top_Secret_America-911_to_the_Boston_Bombings.mkv S31E16-Top_Secret_America-911_to_the_Boston_Bombings.mkv

[0] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/films/ [1] https://www.pbs.org/video/frontline-poor-kids/

Some thought on Frontline seasons:

1. I'm not aware of a definitive source, other than the PBS web site, which has significant gaps in its historical record.
2. TMDB doesn't allow seasons to be numbered by year, even if the official show's web site, like Frontline, is by year. I believe the best approach to numbering series like Frontline, where there isn't a definitive source, is to number the season as years like TVDB does. This eliminates the arguments about which season an episode belongs to. It is usually much easier to find a documented OAD. This also addresses the issue of networks changing their season numbering schemes over the lifetime of a lengthy series.
3. PBS probably switched from ordinal season numbers to seasons numbered by years at some point in the recent past. This raises the issue of how TMDB should handle this type of change.
4. I proposed here: How to Handle Frontline Seasons that TMDB Frontline seasons should be numbered sequentially and contain the matching PBS Frontline episodes for that year. This doesn't address the season numbers mixing that has already occurred, but it does fix it going forward.
5. For older seasons I would recommend not changing the season and episode numbers unless the episodes have documented OADs that are out of order.

@elprice7345 said:

Some thought on Frontline seasons:

1. I'm not aware of a definitive source, other than the PBS web site, which has significant gaps in its historical record.

I believe that the primary issue is the lack of an index that shows episodes which are not available for streaming. I've not done an exhaustive search, but picking unindexed episodes from the 80s at random, I have not found any which do not have a page on the PBS site with an air date and a brief summary[0].

1. I believe the best approach to numbering series like Frontline, where there isn't a definitive source, is to number the season as years like TVDB does.

You make excellent points, and I concur.

1. PBS probably switched from ordinal season numbers to seasons numbered by years at some point in the recent past. This raises the issue of how TMDB should handle this type of change.

I believe it was around 2018 -- tvdb renumbered their episodes around then in response to it and made rather a bit of renaming work for me.

1. This doesn't address the season numbers mixing that has already occurred, but it does fix it going forward.

Excellent.

1. For older seasons I would recommend not changing the season and episode numbers unless the episodes have documented OADs that are out of order.

If I can find some time, I will work on updating dates that I can confirm, adding missing episodes and put together a list of episodes that may need renumbering.

[0] e.g. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/visions-of-star-wars/

In my mind, wikipedia makes the most sense. I know PBS uses years as seasons now, but their site also seems to be missing a lot of data.

Why do we bother with "seasons" and episode numbers at all for a series of largely unconnected documentary films like Frontline? Why do we need anything other than original airdate to organize them? Numbering is a perennial pain - at least at tvdb - where it seems like every new season undergoes multiple changes in start date, and episodes within it are reordered multiple times. This applies to many shows - Nova, American Masters, and American Experience among them. But Frontline is particularly apropos, as the airdate is actually displayed at the beginning of each episode.

Any movement on this. I started adding episodes based on existing data, and now I am realizing the conflict between Season = ordinal vs season = year for what pre-existed on TMDB in the Frontline series.

TMDB says enter no Years for seasons and we can not in fact create a season with a four digit entry.

The first season is "1", the second season is "2." Do not use years as season numbers (e.g. 2017). Please be extra careful. If you misnumbered a season, please file a report.

TV guide and IMDB are probably the only sources as PBS will only ever list by year from this point forward.

Season 41 Episode 1 Lies, Politics and Democracy ....

Season 41 Episode 11 Age of Easy Money

@Johnny Jackhammer said: ... TV guide and IMDB are probably the only sources as PBS will only every list by year from this point forward.

Season 41 Episode 1 Lies, Politics and Democracy

The fact that PBS no longer bothers defining seasons for this show bears consideration. Episodes are likely presented as "Season yyyy" only to make them easier to browse, and because their site design compels them to assign seasons even where it doesn't make sense. (Witness the numerous specials presented as 1-episode series instead of movies.)

I wish PBS would do the same for the other long-running documentary/factual series I mentioned above (and more), because those season numbers are truly insignificant.