I was reading the content bible to clarify this for myself, but I believe it is not watertight in terms of how to deal with multi-part episodes. Takes too much mental kung-fu to arrive at the logic behind this policy which many disagree with.

Relevant section: TV Bible > Episodes > Name > Multi-part episodes

Looking at this TV series and others where there has been discussion on the topic of multi-part episodes, I gather the intent to be:

1. Original broadcast air date is king.
2. Regardless of how the show was conceived or produced, if a multi-part episode is aired together on one night, it gets entered into TMDB as a single episode.
   
3. Rationalle: They aired back to back, the audience saw them as one double or triple length episode on that same day. To hell with every other data source on the internet, that's the TMDB policy.

If that's the rule, then fine.

My advice and the reason i'm replying to myself: Please update the content bible.

-- It suggests that a multi-part episode can be split across two episode slots, which is awesome and exactly what many people are after! But it does not qualify why sometimes multi-part episodes go in as one record.

-- Towards this end, it's missing clarification on how important timing is, whereby if a 2 part episode is first aired back to back - it becomes one episode in TMDB. If they are aired on separate nights, then they go in as two episodes using the multi-part naming convention suggested.

Or I've completely misunderstood the policy, in which case improving communications on this point is even more needed.

The Bible clearly explains that we follow the original release format. An episode first released as one double length episode is entered as a single episode on TMDb. A two-part episode first released as two distinct episodes, even if both parts aired on the same night, is entered as two episodes on TMDb.

Season 1 Episode 1 was produced as a two part episode

Was it?

On Wikipedia, they indicate that this episode was originally a single double length episode and that it has only be split in 2 parts later for rebroacasts and syndication. On the detail page, they list a single production code for it.

In this newspaper of the original broadcast date, this episode is clearly mentionned as "the two-hour pilot". So, this is clearly one single episode.