Unfortunately Plex doesn’t track your progress through a playlist.
With audio, there is currently no workaround for this.

With TV shows and movies however, you can make it work.
This relies on the watched/unwatched status which Plex stores for every video, and on ‘smart playlists’ and on the ‘Airdate’ which Plex downloads automatically for correctly matched tv show episodes…

Below I will use the Arrow/Flash/Supergirl/Legends of Tomorrow ‘universe’ as an example.

This is a ‘smart’ playlist, which grows and shrinks automatically as new episodes come in and episodes get watched.

the snag:

if you stop in the middle of an episode, the episode may or may not be included in this playlist anymore, depending on how far into the episode you got.
In this case, you must remember to

1. continue watching the half-watched episode from Continue Watching
2. after this episode is finished, don’t continue watching, but press Stop
3. then call up your playlist and play this instead

Thankfully the above workaround is no longer needed in some Plex clients (Plex Media Player for instance).

How to build the playlist:

Preparation:

Add all tv shows into a common “Collection”. This makes the following filter rule easier to understand.
Go to the top level of each show, ‘Edit’ it, go to the ‘Tags’ tab and add the name of your collection. In this example, we’ll use “Arrowverse”.
If you rather don’t want to do that, you will find an alternative at the bottom, which uses each show’s title as a separate filter condition.

The Procedure

1. enter your TV Show library in Plex Web
2. set the library view mode to ‘Episodes’
3. then activate the ‘Advanced Filters’
4. filter for ‘Show Collection’ ‘is’ ‘Arrowverse’ (the latter of course depends on the title of the collection during the preparation)
5. click on the + icon to add a second rule ‘Episode Unplayed’ ‘is true’

filter_definition_collection866×577 127 KB

6. set the sorting order to ‘By Release Date’
7. set the sorting order again to ‘By Release Date’ (only this time, it will be ascending - check the little arrow icon) - this is crucial!

sorting_order929×538 493 KB

8. finally, click on the ‘Save as…’ icon and give your playlist a name and save it

without collection

Alternative filter condition if you don’t want to use a collection:

Notice how we are using a nested condition with “match any” to select all the different show titles.
The main condition does use “match all” to combine the results of the nested condition with the requirement that the episode must be “unplayed”.

filter_definition867×577 115 KB

Edit history:
2021-03-25 added new screenshots for the new advanced filters, included the use of a collection by default

Outstanding stuff @OttoKerner

OMFG, i was doing this manualy, i love you <3

I just wanted to thank you for this tutorial. It’s really great, and something that Plex should implement as an actual full supported feature.

So far the only hiccup I’ve encountered is that if shows air on the same days then it defaults to alphabetical* since it can’t take into account the air times. See this screenshot as a really obvious example since it’s a four-part crossover:

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The order shows up as:

Arrow -> Supergirl -> DC's Legends of Tomorrow -> The Flash

When the correct order should be:

Supergirl -> Arrow -> The Flash -> DC's Legends of Tomorrow

Unfortunately, there’s no way to manually change the order in this “Smart Playlist”.

But really, this is not that big deal, I can just manually do the important ones. At the end of the day, this is really great, and for shows that don’t crossover so much, or just making your own random “TV Season” style playlist, this is fantastic.

* It might not actually be alphabetical, it might be like file creation date, or date modified or something, I’m just guessing.

As a side note, I noticed that the dropdown where in the tutorial you choose Episode Plays and set it to 0, also has Episode Unwatched, which can be set to is true or is false. That would seem to be the better choice at first glance, but maybe that’s been added more recently. Just a thought

@rwoffice said:
So far the only hiccup I’ve encountered is that if shows air on the same days then it defaults to alphabetical* since it can’t take into account the air times.

Yes, there is only a ‘date’ available in the metadata sources, no clock time.
I “cheated” by manually changing the ‘air date’ (day-1) of the episode which has to come first.

As a side note, I noticed that the dropdown where in the tutorial you choose Episode Plays and set it to 0, also has Episode Unwatched, which can be set to is true or is false. That would seem to be the better choice at first glance, but maybe that’s been added more recently. Just a thought

Back then when I wrote the tutorial, ‘unplayed=true’ was getting automatically converted to ‘plays=0’.

No worries, I didn’t even know half the stuff in this tutorial was even possible, so it was a big learning experience. Thanks again!

Does the EPG data include the air time as well? This is a great guide, but it seems Plex as a whole falls short on this kind of thing for shows that air on the same day.

Take Chicago Med/Fire/P.D. for eg, usually all 3 episodes air on the same day, but following this guide has the order of them be alphabetical (fire-med-pd).

I can’t seem to find a way to specify a list order as a rule (med before fire before pd), so the list would need to be constantly adjusted manually - and that somewhat defeats the purpose of creating a playlist that will dynamically update itself.

Having the air time also be included as a sorting option would be the final step needed to make this a useful feature across the board.

I don’t believe there is a way for PLEX to automatically do this. I have a smart list for Walking Dead, and what I do is manually bump the air date for TALKING DEAD so that it appears after the appropriate ep even though they are on the same night.

Walking dead S01E01 date 01/01/2019 (day it aired)
Talking Dead S01E01 date 01/02/2019 (manually changed the date to the day after it aired so it will appear in chronological order in a smart list)

If you have a bunch of unwatched seasons, it’s a bit time consuming to set up, but I think it’s worth it for me.

@OttoKerner is the man. I’d done this mostly myself. I found the way to get the crossovers to play in order is to update the Sort Title property with the crossover name and a number (i.e. Crisis on Earth-X (I)). And it works:

DC1067×469 140 KB

Dang. I thought I finally found my solution for the Chicago series’s. However they changed them to all air the same day and it sorts them alphabetical since it doesn’t have air time.

it would be nice to have movies and episodes together in the same list

Unless you add the movies as series ‘specials’, there is no way using this method.

This trick works great, thanks!

Is this done as a playlist or did you set it up as its own series and setup the art for it yourself?

Yes, I used a playlist. I set each crossovers title and sort title to match and placed a roman numeral after the title to get them in order:

Crossover850×588 153 KB

Thanks for the guide Otto.
I’ve been looking for some time for a way to create a playlist to watch the entire Stargate series. In the end I tried to create a playlist manually based on a chronology I found online, but my PMS (Running on a Synology NAS) Seemed to crap out after about 300 or so entries. After that it wouldn’t let me add multiple items, and I had to add them one by one, and it wouldn’t let me rearrange their order either.

I realise this is off topic but do you know anything about that?

Back on topic: can I convert this smart playlist to a regular playlist once it’s been created based on air date? Then perhaps I can manually add the extras in afterwards.

There is no point converting it. Because if you do, the tracking of already played episodes won’t work anymore.

Yeah I understand that. So then does Plex have a good way to include movies in these playlists?
For example of there were a movie in the middle of a season?

Smart playlists only ever cover one library.
Unless you add your movies as a special episode and assign them a fitting “airing date”, you cannot include them with the above method.

Please restrict further questions to the method described above. This is not a general support thread, but a HowTo, dealing with one particular technique.