The Movie Database Support

Given the following API call:

https://api.themoviedb.org/3/discover/tv?api_key=APIKEY&sort_by=popularity.desc&air_date.gte=2019-06-16&page=1&timezone=America%2FLos_Angeles&with_original_language=en

I would expect many shows to be excluded from the results.
Two obvious results that should be excluded are "Breaking Bad" and "The Office", both have had no episodes in many many years (well before the 2019-06-16 filter applied).

Am I misunderstanding the filtering mechanism?

7 replies (on page 1 of 1)

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I'm not sure, but ...
&air_date versus &first_air_date

&air_date = These are the exhibition and re-exhibition dates in any country in the world.
Old ones should appear because many have been re-displayed on new dates, more recent than the date you specified in the filter.

&first_air_date = It is the worldwide release date. Usually the one that appears in quotes, next to the Title.

So, I think you should use first_air_date.
To be more precise, use &first_air_date.gte=2019-06-16

Remembering that these dates may be the episode's airing.
If the series is long, with 15 seasons, 15 years of dates.

See here https://developers.themoviedb.org/3/discover/tv-discover

first_air_date seems to be a "fixed" value on an entire show and not for individual episodes. In other words, once the first episode has aired for a show, the first_air_date does not change (which is what I expect).

As far as I can tell, TMDb doesn't actually keep track of "re-exhibition" dates for individual episodes.

air_date tends to give results I expect, but only within the confines of a specific day or within the previous month. In my original example, it seems like a year-old is problematic.

As another example, assume the both the gte and lte were both set to 2019-06-16. This narrows the search to a single day.

Using the first_air_date variants yields only a handful of shows: all of which had their first episode that aired 2019-06-19. Using the air_date variants yields a number of shows, presumably ones that had an episode on 2019-06-19.

I'm interested in that latter scenario.

It seems that the rules are a little different from Movies.
For example "Breaking Bad".
I can only assume that there was an exhibition, of any episode, in any of the 41 countries, after 2019-06-16.
But that would need to be checked by looking at the 41 countries.
I think my suggestion only hindered the solution.
Excuse me.
I believe that Travis Bell can answer your question precisely.

By using air_date, you're filtering episode air dates. Just looking at your first example with Breaking Bad, there's a special that was added (which looks like it was intended to be El-Camino) in season 0.

Gotcha. That makes sense to me. Thanks for pointing out the specials, I forgot to check those.

I'd argue that that specific item probably doesn't belong as a special, but at least there's a reason. wink

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