Every TV show ID's as "The Season"

[rojaslen]

Server Version#: 1.29.0.6244 (Debian Linux)
Player Version#: 4.87.2

The title says it: every single TV show I add to the server will correctly ID the show’s name for a second or two, then it ALWAYS changes itself to this:

The Season
2009
Dramatised reality series about a group of ten teenagers who descend on the party capital of Val d’Isère in the French Alps for their gap years

I then have to go in and manually “Fix Match” and find the correct listing. This happens to EVERY SINGLE SHOW. Once I select the right one it’s fine, but it shouldn’t be necessary to do that on literally every new addition.

Currently I use this format:
Show Name\Season 01 (YYYY)\S01E01 - Episode Title

My guess is this happens because there are generally a bunch of subfolders with “Season 01, Season 02” etc, but the naming guidelines specifically say to spell it out like that, so what gives? How can I either adjust the naming conventions to make scanning work right, or alternately just blocklist that specific show so it can’t be flagged? Based on the description I would never watch it, and before I started using Plex had never even heard of it.

[dbirch]

Your naming schema is off.
<SHOW NAME> (<YEAR>)\Season <S##>\<SHOW NAME> (<YEAR>) - S<S##>E<E##> - <EPISODE TITLE>

My canned response is to see https://support.plex.tv/articles/naming-and-organizing-your-tv-show-files/ and:

If you want to save yourself a lot of time I would recommend using Download - tinyMediaManager and use:

Episode format:
${showTitle} - S${seasonNr2}E${episodeNr2} - ${title}

Folder format:
${showTitle} (${showYear}) {tvdb-${tvShow.ids.tvdb}}/Season ${seasonNr2}

as the new name format.
(Please note I linked to the v3 which is free to use)

[leelynds]

I suspect the problem is the file naming and/or folder structure. You have the season folders including a year in brackets, so Plex is looking for a TV series named “The Season.” The year works best when it’s included in the series title… Also include the series name before the season/episode identification. Something like this will probably work better:

Show Name (YYYY)\Season 01\Show Name - S01E01 - Episode Title

Chances are you will have to Plex Dance the files to make it work properly.

[rojaslen]

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

It turns out that all I needed to do was adjust the directory/folder names to contain the premiere/season 01 year at the series name level only, then strip the years from the individual season folders. The episode filenames themselves don’t appear to need editing. It’s not media-file-focused, but that’s all easy enough to do with BRU.

This new format with the earliest (YYYY) moved up one level seems to work fine:
Show Name (YYYY)\Season 01\S01E01 - Episode Title

vs. the original format that caused the error:
Show Name\Season 01 (YYYY)\S01E01 - Episode Title

I initially had the seasons date-stamped instead of the series because some shows have skipped production years, and others have an unusual broadcast schedule so I marked the individual season years in broadcast order, which seems to have introduced the scan error. Interlinked spin-off show dates can matter for continuity as well.

I verified it works with the most extreme example of that sort of show that I have: Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes series. Four seasons over nine years, each season with its own “series” name and they were released on an oddball timetable, with Season 2 coming three years after Season 1, then Season 3 five years later and ending with Season 4 the year after that – but the whole works is considered to be one series.

Thanks again, I was getting really sick of fixing every single new match.

[dbirch]

No Problem, the only reason you include the original air date year is to assist in matching to the correct show. All air dates, and metadata get pulled down from tvdb/tmdb. But when there are multiple shows with the same name the scanner/matcher then falls back to the year ( and then the tvdb/tmdb ID if included in the directory name)