I have a lot of TV series with specials, but when I hide seasons and use Episode sorting, the specials don’t line up in the right place by air time.
The special will either be at the top or at the bottom, and according to the air time they should be in the middle of the two seasons.
All episodes have been named as suggested by plex, including the specials, but Episode sorting still doesn’t work properly. This bug has been reported years ago and has not yet been fixed, please fix it.
As in the picture above, the special episode that aired on 2020-12-23 was placed in the first, The first episode of the first season aired on 2019-04-15 was placed in the second, The Episode sorting is Oldest first, The first episode of the first season should be in the first place, and the special episode should be between the second and third season, it’s not in the right place, all TV series are like this.
Yeah, it appears that when you display a TV show without “seasons”, it will only list the episodes in numerical order based on the season/episode numbers. This means it places the Specials season first in the “Oldest First” sort mode.
I don’t see any way to change this behavior around, but don’t worry. If you click the “Play” button at the top of this menu, to play the entire show, Plex will play the first unwatched episode based on the date the episode aired. This means that specials that air mid-season are played at the appropriate time, followed by the rest of the season as you’d expect.
You can create a custom playlist with all these episodes in it, and specifically sort the episodes in it based on this order. This will visually sort episodes based on date, so the specials appear mid-show. Then if you select play on the playlist it simply plays each episode in order.
Sidebar: Testing it out (on one old show I have), I feel that “Oldest First” and “Newest First” sort modes are a kind of inaccurate label in general for TV Shows. I’ve only changed this order for short-term recorded show late-night hosts, such as the daily show. For these shows, the term “newest first” works well. But any show with specials in them will (probably) not sort like you’d expect for this mode. So as long as a show is simple without specials, the term “newest first” applies well, but any newly added special will (likely) not show up on the “newest” position
So, technically, it looks like Plex uses “oldest” and “newest” to simply mean numerically. If you do not sort based on date, then these terms are inaccurate.
Emby has a feature that allows you to display mid-season specials within a season, it makes the special appear where it supposed to be, at the same time, the special episode will remain in the 00th season. I think that’s a great feature, and it’s by default.
The only way to put specials and regular seasons together in Plex is to hide seasons and reorder episodes, however this function does not work properly, Plex should have done better.
from when the same “issue” was mentioned a year (or maybe longer) ago, it was suggested it was by design, in that it orders it by season, then episode rather than air date.
I saw this post, so before at least Newest first was once able to put the special in the correct position according to the air time, then after the update instead modified this function, resulting in the special now can not be sorted according to the air time at all.
What I also like to mention is that specials are not seasons. But this is how it is displayed in the overview of a tv show. When there ist only one season (especially anime) and several special episodes it is listed as a 2 season tv show…
Good point, the special can be listed as season 0 with the other seasons, but it should be excluded when calculating the total number of seasons of the show.
The problem with the sorting of the Specials is still unresolved, and no official response has been received.
