Actor Filmography not (fully) sorted, has incorrect dates and duplicates

General Discussions
1

I see this with many actor profile pages, both on the AppleTV client and the Windows Client (Version 1.81.0.4012-a9d3f098), also with previous versions. It also shows up on the web version of the client.

At the end of the (chronologically sorted) Actor Filmography, there are some out-of-order entries. E.g. for Colin Firth, the end of the list looks like

....
1984	Camille	as Armand Duval
1984	Another Country	as Tommy Judd
1972	Crown Court	as Pc Franklin
1999	'Pride and Prejudice': The Making of...	as Mr. Darcy
2008	Mamma Mia: Deleted Scenes	as Harry
2010	Behind the Carol: The Full Motion-Capture Experience	as Fred
1951	Hallmark Hall Of Fame	as Armand

And there seem to be several issues with this:

  1. The last 4 entries do not follow the chronological order.
  2. It is debatable if appearances in “making of” or “behind the scenes” extras deserve an extra mention in the list. For Colin Firth, “Pride and Prejudice”, “Mamma Mia” and “A Christmas Carol” are already listed further up. Personally, I’d rather not see these extras but I can Imagine people who might want to see this. As a comparison: IMDB does not list them.
  3. The last entry, Hallmark, is actually in chronological order, but before Colin Firth was even born. This is a reported issue, but the post was closed, so I think it may not have made it into the bug tracker.
  4. It seems that the “Hallmark Hall of Fame” movies are not actually separate appearances, but rather re-releases of existing movies already listed under the “Hallmark” label. In Colin Firth’s case, it was “1984 Camille” which is already on the list. So having the “Hallmark” entry there is a duplicate in addition to the incorrect year shown.
  5. The entry from “1972 Crown Court” has a similar issue as #3. The series started in 1972, but the episode Colin Firth appeared in was in 1984, according to IMDB. However, in this case Plex does not show a duplicate, but only this single entry with an incorrect year.

As these issues can also be reproduced with the web client, without even logging into Plex, I skipped on the logs and further details. If others cannot reproduce it, I am happy to dig deeper and share more details.

2

I see what you are seeing by clicking that link. My thoughts:

Hallmark Hall of Fame is a TV Series, which started in 1951. Unfortunately, the actor page won’t display what specific year of a tv show an actor was in it, which sucks when you want to know what specific episode someone was in “The Love Boat”, for example. So my guess would be that Colin Firth was featured in a more recent Hall of Fame episode, when he was alive. But the show itself is listed as its start date. Not a lot of shows last a long time (some soaps, SNL, daily shows, etc), so when a REALLY old date shows up for what is a still-running show, it can be jarring. I’d like it if the list displays the year (or a range) that they appeared in a show, not the show’s year itself.

The other 3 non-chronological entries at the bottom appear to be “documentary” or “deleted scenes” entries. I find it unlikely that they’d have an IMDB entry for them, but somehow they still made it into Plex’ database as credits for Colin. This may explain why they are not chronological, as they may be data corruption due to not having imdb entries or something.

Very interesting find. Makes me wonder how Plex handles show name/year mismatches between imdb, tmdb, and tvdb to make their OWN list.

3

Thank you for the confirmation @Divideby0!

I only used Colin Firth as an example. I see these out-of-order entries for many actors. Presumably at least everyone who ever had a movie released through Hallmark which seem to be 1-3 movies per year sind 1951.

Or any similar long running series.

4

for those three that are in the wrong spot it looks like there is some sort of incorrect or missing data. If you click on the Pride and Prejudice one for example it shows “not yet available” for the release date but is using that other date for the list and I think is sorting based on the wrong thing (some field being empty and putting at the end). I have reported to the team that handles that and they will look into it. ( I’m sure there are other actors filmography that have the same issue)