The Movie Database Support
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Popular TV results different between web and API
posted by ymendelSTAFFMOD on March 3, 2024 at 1:38 PM
I've noticed that the results between the web and API "popular TV shows" are quite different. https://www.themoviedb.org/tv?language=en-US and https://developer.themoviedb.org/reference/tv-series-popular-list give very different results.
Piping
curl --request GET \
--url 'https://api.themoviedb.org/3/tv/popular?language=en-US&page=1' \
--header 'Authorization: Bearer TOKEN' \
--header 'accept: application/json'
through jq to get the names results in
"The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson"
"The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon"
"Good Mythical Morning"
"Brothers"
"The Daily Show"
"The Late Show with Stephen Colbert"
"The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson"
"The Colbert Report"
"Halo"
"Anderson Cooper 360°"
"Plus belle la vie"
"Doraemon"
"You Hee-yeol's Sketchbook"
"Gute Zeiten, schlechte Zeiten"
"The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live"
"Elas por Elas"
"Binnelanders"
"Hollywood Squares"
"Die Harald Schmidt Show"
"The Jennifer Hudson Show"
But the first ones on the Web are
The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson
Good Mythical Morning
The Daily Show
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Duel Masters
Halo
You Hee-yeol's Sketchbook
The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live
The Late Late Show with James Corden
Running Man
The Dick Cavett Show
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
Avatar: The Last Airbender
There are some overlaps, but in different order. And there are some things that appear in one list and not the other.
What's happening here, and what API call should I actually use to get the Popular TV shows?
Reply by Travis Bell
on March 4, 2024 at 12:04 PM
Hi @ymendel,
Web isn't using the "popular" endpoint. It's doing a custom discover call. You can see which filters are selected by looking at all of the filters on the left hand side of the page.
Reply by ymendel
on March 4, 2024 at 12:31 PM
https://developer.themoviedb.org/reference/tv-series-popular-list also says it's just a discover call behind the scenes and shows the equivalent call. Is the difference between that and the web popular list just that the web one uses the US
watch_region?Also, does the
languageparameter in the popular endpoint not restrict anything? I imagine it shouldn't return https://www.themoviedb.org/tv/13945-gute-zeiten-schlechte-zeiten as one of the results when the call is to https://api.themoviedb.org/3/tv/popular?language=en-US&page=1Reply by Travis Bell
on March 4, 2024 at 12:52 PM
I believe so.
Nope,
languageis not a filter. It's only used to display localized data if there is some for the items returned in a query.