and I deleted the overviews copied from fernsehserien.de, for your request I let the decision to another moderator

They kind of look like films to me, but I don't understand a single word of German so...

Yeah, in Germany, some channels/studios produce series you could better call "Filmreihe" (a series of movies), what is a sequence of episodes, 90 minutes each and featuring the same roles and actors. They don't produce many episodes per year (mostly one to three). They never make it into theatres, only to be seen on TV (but they sell them as DVDs later). Also, they follow a small story line (based on the characters) with closed topics (often criminal cases), but it's usually not necessary to watch them sequentially. Only to see the characters developing. And they don't use something like seasons. They just sequentially number the episode. Samara mentioned it in another thread, to be probably handled somehow on TMDB. I prefer to see it as kind of a mini-series (although there are examples of 70+ episodes (produced since more than 20 years)) or even more than 1000 episodes (example "Tatort") - but that's a different story.

As movies usually don't get too many "episodes/parts" (even "Rocky" has below 10 🤣). Other productions of my series examples have numbers in the two-digit area, making it inconvenient to manage them as single movies. Also, because the episodes mainly share the crew and cast with only few exceptions.

A slightly different example is the "series" Tatort (scene of the crime): https://www.themoviedb.org/tv/3034-tatort. It's been produced since 1970 with different teams in different cities, and very successful with the Germans. Doing always the same: solving crimes. While "Tatort" will be some kind of super-series, and every team is it's own series. The teams usually feature two main characters, using the main-main character as name of the team (eg. Stellbrink, Faber, Odenthal, Lessing, Sieland). Very seldom, there is a cross-over of two different teams. Every now and then, a new teams starts, while other teams are on duty since more than 20 years having also somewhat around 70 episodes.

Example: In season "2018" (what is a very appropriate season numbering) the first episode has the title "Stellbrink - 07 - Mord Ex Machina", meaning the 7th episode of team "Stellbrink" with title "Mord Ex Machina". What I don't like, is the blending of all teams into one big series, as I don't like to follow all the teams. And I believe, nobody really does.

As I'm used to work with databases 😜🤓 , I'd prefer to see a flexible grouping of series with multiple levels. Something like: The series "Tatort" has one sub-series "Stellbrink" with the episodes 1 thru 11 and other sub-series. Or "Tatort" to be a collection of separate series, as they don't share characters (except with cross-over episodes).

Equivalent to "NCIS". NCIS as the super series (or collection), with NCIS:Los Angeles, NCIS: New Orleans and NCIS itself. The same with CSI (Las Vegas, Miami, New York, Cyber). With these two examples, it's easy to determine, as all series have the NCIS or CSI keywords in their names.

As with NCIS and CSI:Las Vegas, regular actors (and therefore characters) drop out, and get replaced with new characters to remain with the original concept.

Last words: Unfortunately, I haven't found a definition on how to unambiguously categorise situations like the case of "Die Eifelpraxis". Is it a series, a mini-series or a list of single movies? Or a series collection in case of "Tatort"? That's why I struggle a bit to categorise them, and I prefer to see them (eg. "Die Eifelpraxis") as series rather than separate movies. I feel a bit like Wall-E, as he finds a spoon-fork combined item and don't know where to put it: to the bundle of forks or to the bundle of spoons 🤪. So he put it in the middle 🤪

@awenny wrote:

Yeah, in Germany, some channels/studios produce series you could better call "Filmreihe" (a series of movies), what is a sequence of episodes, 90 minutes each and featuring the same roles and actors. They don't produce many episodes per year (mostly one to three). They never make it into theatres, only to be seen on TV (but they sell them as DVDs later). Also, they follow a small story line (based on the characters) with closed topics (often criminal cases), but it's usually not necessary to watch them sequentially. Only to see the characters developing. And they don't use something like seasons. They just sequentially number the episode. Samara mentioned it in another thread, to be probably handled somehow on TMDB.

Thanks for your long explanation!

The other thread you mention is this one: https://www.themoviedb.org/talk/5a648c999251410b2a022a5b

Back then, I started a discussion internally about this topic ("Filmreihe" vs. "Filmserie"), by reference to your 2 issue reports. But, unfortunately, we moderators came to no conclusion and the discussion stopped without a final decision (internal link).

In my opinion, we should find a better solution for this problem, because right now every moderator decides differently per each case ("go with feeling"), which causes a huge amount of duplicates and a lot of confusion for all of us (users and moderators). And it does not only regard German content - such "umbrella series" are common for other countries, too. A final and simple decision would be great - but I gave up to find one and to keep the discussion going ...

@janar72 said: The other thread you mention is this one: https://www.themoviedb.org/talk/5a648c999251410b2a022a5b

That's right. It's exactly the same case as with this one, and also several others not mentioned in this thread nor the other thread.

@janar72 said: Back then, I started a discussion internally about this topic ("Filmreihe" vs. "Filmserie"), by reference to your 2 issue reports. But, unfortunately, we moderators came to no conclusion and the discussion stopped without a final decision (internal link).

In my opinion, we should find a better solution for this problem, because right now every moderator decides differently per each case ("go with feeling"), which causes a huge amount of duplicates and a lot of confusion for all of us (users and moderators). And it does not only regard German content - such "umbrella series" are common for other countries, too. A final and simple decision would be great - but I gave up to find one and to keep the discussion going ...

Thank you, for being that honest.

I truly think the same. A general rule what to categorise how is important for everyone. I'm not that long using TMDB, but as I understand, the feature for series came way later than the feature "movie" (as in The*Movie*DB). So it's partly a historical issue as well.

And important are the details associated with the category. Why is a movie a movie? Or which feature causes a movie no longer to be treated as movie rather than as an episode of a series. Etc ... .. .

But I'm still thinking about the difference in your "Filmreihe" vs. "Filmserie" ...

And important are the details associated with the category. Why is a movie a movie?

In my opinion, for current content, the most important critera is how the original network aired them and categorize them on their website. If all movies have individual pages, I would add them as movies. If they are treated like a series and split into seasons, then we can add them as a series. But somehow that doesn't seem to help you guys.