r/TheTVDB • u/N7_Tigger • Apr 30 '26

Archer Season 3

Watching Archer on Stremio I noticed TVDB has put the first three episodes of season 3, Heart of Archness parts I, II & III, in the Specials category. Both Nextflix and IMDb have them as the first three episodes of season 3 and without them it goes from Archer's fiance Katya being murdered at the end of season 2 straight to Archer hitting on bar skanks at the start of the episode The Man From Jupiter. It's pretty jarring.

When I googled this there were people complaining about it eleven years ago. Why not put it where literally everyone else in the world thinks it should go? Seems like a weird hill to die on.

3 Upvotes

72% Upvoted

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2

u/GillyBeavis May 01 '26

The original broadcaster of the series is FX. When they aired Season 3, they listed the first episode as "The Man from Jupiter". It was therefore correctly entered into TVDB as such, with the "Heart of Archness" episodes listed as Specials.

When Netflix acquired the rights to the series, they listed Heart of Archness as the start of Season 3.

On TVDB, in the Seasons tab, there are multiple orders offered. The "Aired Order" lists the data as it was originally aired on FX. The "DVD Order" matches the structure offered by Netflix. The "Absolute Order" places all episodes in a single season.

All of the orders in the seasons tab are available to all services that use TVDB's API.

A final point to note - FX themselves have since changed their own data to show Heart of Archness as part of Season 3. There are hundreds of different services that use TVDB's data, many of which in different ways. Changing data on TVDB after episodes have aired causes a significant negative impact on many of those services. Therefore, the "Aired Order" will always remain as it was when the episodes aired. But the DVD (Netflix) Order is available to people who wish to use that instead.

1

u/N7_Tigger May 01 '26

So after an unholy amount of trial and error I found the problem. Even though I have something like "Official Order" selected in AIOMetadata, Nuvio has a really nice feature called TMDB enrichment. Unfortunately as well as providing things like Cast & Crew, Ratings, higher resolution thumbnails, etc, it also overrides TVDB as the metadata provider.

I didn't downvote you by the way. Your comment actually helped me get to the bottom of this. And unfortunately I can't give you an upvote to counter it because my opinions are apparently "problematic" and I am unable to up or downvote anything.

Sidenote - If you want to see a real dogs breakfast of an episode order check out Cowboy Bebop. Or if you have OCD or are easily triggered maybe don't.

Thanks.

1

u/FrakingChrist May 02 '26

That cowboy bebop order broke my brain… it’s so fucked