Divide a TV show into categories instead of seasons/year?

[Arby 7]

I have a new problem: I have 2 or 3 shows that I don't want to be grouped into the official "seasons". For example, "Looney Tunes" doesn't really had seasons, but years in which the cartoons were released. But these years are no concern of mine, instead I would like to group those cartoons by its character: Bugs Bunny, Duffy Duck, Speedy Gonzales, etc.

I am aware that some episodes might have two of those characters (Speedy Gonzales + Sylvester, for example), but let's ignore this in the first place.

Another example is the german TV Show "Tatort", where, in a loose order, several police investigators solve criminal cases. I'd like to sort these episodes by its main character (Schimanski, for example).

Until yesterday, those shows were sorted by year, as it was supposed to be. Then I thought I could "twist" something, so I added folders for each character, renamed the files so that the episode no. would not be the number from that year but continous for the complete show (eg. "Tatort - 1981x0126 - Schimanski - 01 - Duisburg-Ruhrort.mp4"). The .nfo file for those entries were already present and renamed accordingly. It seemed to work and I was able to change the "Season meta data" for that folder to something I want to show in Emby UI (eg. "ab 1981: Schimanski"). Same for Looney Tunes. The episodes were shown correctly and I was happy.

And then came the night (and the scheduled tasks in the early morning) ...

My Bugs Bunny Looney Tunes somehow landed in a TV Show "The Bugs Bunny Show" (which is not!) with its own tvshow.nfo in the subfolder (there was already a tvshow.nfo for Looney Tunes in the parent folder!). Same with "Tatort": My several episodes suddenly were something completely different, belonging to other TV shows I actually don't have.

Long story short: It didn't work.

How should I proceed to group those shows by main character instead of year?

Edited October 8, 2022 by Arby

[Luke 42085]

Hi, I would suggest going back to the season based file and folder organization. For character associations, what about using collections?

[Arby 7]

I was afraid you would say that. I returned to the season/year based folders already. But I am not happy with the idea of adding 50 collections, one for each different "Tatort" main character... That will drown all other collections and in my eyes makes that concept useless.

Will stay as it is now...

Perhaps it could be a good idea to introduce series-based collections. Ie. collection that only appear in the context of a series main page.

Edited October 9, 2022 by Arby

[Luke 42085]

Hi, yes, something to consider for future updates. Thanks for the feedback.