SPECIALS:
Specials typically happen in-between seasons of a show as a one-off episode to add context or expand on an idea. They’re not meant to be watched sequentially, one special after another.
Doctor Who is a good example of this. It has a ton of them. It’s annoying after watching a season to have to look back through Specials to figure out which one you’re supposed to watch next from the giant list of all the specials they ever released. There is airdate metadata, so instead of having a separate “season” for specials, each special should appear chronologically in the UI in between seasons.
The other issue I have is that a “Special” is counted as a season in the library view and falsely increments the season count of a series. It’s especially annoying seeing a show that only ever had one season listed as “2 seasons”.
DVD EXTRAS:
In this example I’ll be using The Simpsons DVDs but this could apply to any series with a lot of seasons, eg Star Trek TNG, Doctor Who, etc.
Up to now there’s 31 seasons of The Simpsons. Every DVD/Bluray release has (or will have) dozens of extras. As a completist, I like to include extras. That’s potentially ~500 items essentially just dumped into what is essentially a junk drawer named “Specials”.
And the order of them? Well, if you follow the tvdb submissions on extras it’s usually an incomplete mess. This is not a good user experience and is totally unsustainable for a growing library.
Plex needs to divorce DVD Extras from Specials and figure out a different way of displaying them that honors the fact that they’re closely associated with the season they came from. They should copy the concept they have for movie extras. Have an “Extras” area inside of each season, separate from the normal episodes but still obviously associated with the season.
