Something I really miss from when I was still managing my media library in iTunes was how easy it was to create simple “smart” playlists for TV series that had some kind of overlap, cross-overs, etc. One very simple example is all the various NCIS series, where I could just build a playlist that contained all episodes matching the following criteria:
- Series name contains “NCIS”
- Episode is unplayed
And then the entire thing would be sorted by air date, oldest to newest. That way, I could watch every episode of all the NCIS series as they were released, knowing I would never miss any crossover events and would see them in the “intended” order.
This kind of feature would be useful in so many other ways, too - one could imagine having a “smart” playlist containing only unplayed episodes of one’s favorite shows, making it a good place to start your day. You can get some of the same experience using an advanced filter, but then you’re - at best - just getting all shows that have one or more unplayed episodes; you can’t set an internal sort order of the individual episodes or anything like that.
