The last 3 seasons of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (8, 9, and 10) were actually renamed at the time to The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.
If I take those 3 seasons and put them in a directory for the proper name of those seasons of the show as seasons 1, 2, and 3… as iMDb has them… Plex doesn’t recognize the show. Nor does Plex recognize the show if the seasons are 8, 9, and 10.
If I rename the files and put them in the Alfred Hitchcock Presents folder as seasons 8, 9, and 10, Plex will put the episodes in there but without metadata.
In these instances I am not sure what my procedure should be. Is there a way to look up the database online that Plex TV shows are connecting to? Add to or modify it? Or is there some other solution?
FYI if I do a search for The Alfred Hitchcock Hour the show comes up with all the correct episodes and metadata but with no sources available. Isn’t this the same database used for the Plex TV metadata?
Which scanner and agent are you using for your library? If using Plex TV Series, you should be able to name your files and directory structure something like the following:
test_tv/ <--- TV series library points here (name not important)
└── The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962)
├── Season 01
│ └── The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962) - S01E01.mkv
├── Season 02
│ └── The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962) - S02E01.mkv
└── Season 03
└── The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962) - S03E01.mkv
This results in correct metadata being pulled for “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour” seasons 1, 2, and 3. From season 1:
IMDB is only good for finding movie information but Plex doesn’t use any show order from them. They often have odd show orders or just incomplete information
The TVDB and TMDB have different show orders sometimes
If you find a source that fits the way you have a show ordered, be it the TVDB or TMDB you can change that in the advanced settings (the default show order for a newly created library is TMDB)
Click the pencil on the show poster and go to advanced
Seeing the reply above of how it worked for another user got me suspecting my problem might have to do with Plex wanting to conflate the two shows at some point. So I removed both shows completely and only added The Alfred Hitchcock Hour in as Seasons 1, 2, and 3. That worked correctly for the first time, since the shows for Alfred Hitchcock Presents were not present to confuse it, apparently. Then I added the Alfred Hitchcock Presents shows back in and that was also correctly added as a separate show.
So I fixed a problem I still don’t understand, but that’s good enough!
It sounds like what you ended up doing was essentially the Plex Dance (perhaps with a step or two missing). That can sometimes be required particularly, when there’s a chance of episodes being detected as duplicates (I should have mentioned that in my earlier post. Oops).
