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Topic: Field Request

6th Sep 2015, 3:48 PM
	23skidoo Member since Jul 2014 4061 Points	Just my 2 cents regarding "First Broadcast on" as a field. Problem with such a field is there are many shows for which this information varies from country to country and you might well run into a scenario where someone enters a date based on their country but the actual official debut date might have been different. Wikipedia and IMDb run into this problem all the time, to the point where as I've entered series I've had to be very careful with dates and have on numerous occasions gone to offline sources (we used to call them books!) for the years. And when it comes to shows broadcast in the UK it gets insane, especially with the ITV affiliates: I have a book listing all the TV shows Gerry Anderson produced and there's several different debut dates given for UFO, for example, because different ITV networks launched it at a different times - even different YEARS in some cases. While I'm not going to outright oppose the idea, I think it may be more trouble than it's worth. Year of first broadcast is tricky enough at times. In response to the rejection of the idea (which I think came from my suggestion) regarding a Creator field be added, I think it can be easily handled the same way we handle cast lists: leave space for entering at least 2 names and then give the option to add more under the "Add Missing Info" tab. Realistically the vast majority of TV series will have no more than 2 names listed as creator anyway. The one challenge, which I acknowledge, is there are many series for whom identifying the creator is actually a bit controversial as there is no on-screen recognition. For example, Doctor Who is often credited to Sydney Newman but there are about 4-5 other people who also are credited; The Prisoner is one where there's been a lot of debate over who created it, Patrick McGoohan or George Markstein; and who created the 2007 version of The Bionic Woman? Officially not Kenneth Johnson, the creator of the original 1976 series as he never got a credit for it. It would probably be necessary to restrict a "Created by" tag to on-screen credit only. (Roddenberry could still be credited for Star Trek even though he doesn't get an on-screen credit on TOS because he gets a retroactive credit for TOS on TNG and the other Trek series.) Edited by 23skidoo on 23rd Sep 2015, 3:56 PM