Please see https://www.themoviedb.org/bible/tv/59f73eb49251416e71000026#59f7445c9251416e7100003a

The first season is "1", the second season is "2."

Do not use years as season numbers (e.g. 2017).

I guess you could title season 6 "Season 2024", but the number of the season should still be 6.

Since TVDB also started a new season with the first episode of 2024, I've just set up a season 6 and called it "2024". It will mess things up if we don't at least split the seasons at the same episode. Now, 5x44 has to be moved to 6x01.

Okay, that's a good compromise. Season 6 but with a season title of "Season 2024". It looks like TVDB reverted to Season 6 also. Only thing left is to move 5x44 as 6x01.

I've just created the episode again in Season 6 and asked for 5x44 to be removed in a separate ticket, as I'm not sure if the mods are monitoring the discussions. I guess this discussion can be closed.

This doesn't look good. I don't know when and who decided on what splits a season (I agree it's weird), but at the very least, we should be consistent and keep the pattern of ending a season on the last day of March, the end of the Japanese government's fiscal year (and this is produced by Japan's public broadcaster). If they make changes/updates to the program (like the opening animation/song), then it's done at the beginning of Japan's fiscal year.

Also, imo the numbering of the season title should really be continuous and increment by one, otherwise the jump in numbers looks odd. The year is still right next to the season's title in brackets. That said, it is just the season title so it's not a big deal.

I agree it does look weird mainly because the previous seasons didn't really follow a consistent rule. I didn't noticed the pattern of most season breaks being at the beginning of April. But it seems like that break has been missed several times in the past leading to some really long seasons. Looking at the past air dates I can't really see any kind of logical break for a season split. So any date we pick seems pretty arbitrary so why not just go by the calendar year?

I just did a quick check and it seems that the show changed its intro once, starting with episode 5x01 - which explains that split. But I can't make sense of the other splits. Season 2 for example has 108 episodes from April 2016 to March 2019.

I guess in the long run it would be best to decide on one way to split and maybe even update everything retroactively. But I'm not sure making such big changes is desirable, as it might mess things up for people (like tracking progress or their personal media library).

@terryy93 said:

But it seems like that break has been missed several times in the past leading to some really long seasons. Looking at the past air dates I can't really see any kind of logical break for a season split.

Yeah, I never understood why the seasons weren't split annually. Made no sense.

@silsha said:

I guess in the long run it would be best to decide on one way to split and maybe even update everything retroactively. But I'm not sure making such big changes is desirable, as it might mess things up for people (like tracking progress or their personal media library).

I'm all for redoing the seasons and ignoring TVDB, it's just a lot of data to transfer, and it all needs to be done manually (and carefully). And yes, it may initially cause some frustration with trakt users and other platforms that rely on various tmdb scapers. Though TVMaze organised it as it should be and it looks great (their Begin Japanology entry has more complete info than here and TVDB too).

Any thoughts/opinions on adjusting everything?

I support switching to the way TVMaze sorts it.

Edit: I am uncertain about how TMDB handles such requests. From what I recall, episodes cannot be moved to different seasons, and moderators are the only ones who can delete existing episodes.

I would prefer the TVMaze organization too. I am just a little weary about making such a big change affecting older show data.

Should be fine. I have most of the data and images stored on my computer. And as long as we shift the current episode to around episode 100+, we can keep referencing all the data while creating the new seasons. It will take time though, especially with some of the good crew info @silsha added recently.

I've started things off by adding 2023 and 2024. For the moment, I've just left the season titles without the year, which is what I prefer (since the year is right there), but if more disagree with me, then just change them. That's no problem with me.

I'll keep updating prior seasons in the next week or two. Once I get to the episodes with crew data, it's going to be a bit slower, unless @silsha you want to add them? Might be an idea to split some tasks.

The one thing I haven't yet done with the newly adjusted seasons is add IMDB and TVDB episode ids. It's probably easier to do this all at once when everything is adjusted.

I have just started adding information for 2022. As for crew data, I fill it out randomly since I do not watch the episodes in order. I only add crew data when I have a spare minute at the end of each episode. Right now, I'm going to see if I can find some episodes from 2022-2024 that had crew data and fill them in, so at least those seasons should be cleared up in a moment.

Edit: 2021 is also done, including all crew information. (Images still missing.)

Found out about the strange season split:

• https://web.archive.org/web/20160507031232/http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/tv/japanologyplus
• https://web.archive.org/web/20190707231338/https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/tv/japanologyplus/program-20190326.html

Don't know why there was a split from what was 3 to 4 though.

Also, @silsha this might be of interest: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/information/2020033006002/ (so with anything aired prior to March 30, 2020, the names should be added exactly as they were credited; I just noticed in the older eps, that some names were the Eastern order, so I've gone through a lot of them and switched them).

I'm honestly not sure what indicates a season split in the urls you provided - maybe I'm missing something. But either way, I'd stick with our current plan of splitting into annual seasons.

I was just checking the current progress and noticed that we have 2021 in season 8 and 2020 in season 6. Is this intentional or are we off by one?

And regarding the names: That's really good information as I'm still struggling to identify the given and family names in most cases.