Once you have the whole season it collapses the individual episodes into the season in the recently added tv

Plex will automatically do that for all episodes added within 1 day IIRC:

  • Adding a single episode will display that episode itself
  • Adding multiple episodes or an entire season will display that season
  • Adding episodes from multiple seasons, multiple entire seasons or the full show will display the show

There’s an existing feature suggestion to generally collapse/group episodes by their seasons as well as one asking to only display the show’s poster. I recommend you comment/vote in those threads in order to avoid distracting votes/attention.

Therefore closing this thread as a duplicate.