Series Hue - Mid 2023 Update

SeriesHue is a small web app that allows you to explore the IMDB data in a different way. It's inspired by SeriesHeat by Jim Vallandingham, but tries to solve some of the issues I had with it. If you want to find out more, you can read the original post mortem.

Well, I've been using the app a lot and I'm mostly happy with it, but I identified some issues that needed attention.

The normal user flow is to search for a show and then explore the results. But I also added a top 25 feature for the whole year. I think that's a great feature to find new and interesting shows. But sadly, there is a drawback with the way I interpret the data. Instead of just looking at the score of the title and taking that for my top 25 list, I'm looking at the episodes and take the average of the score of the episodes. This has the consequence that my result differ greatly from the "official" score, because they are using the data of the title.

Yes, for the most part, but this also means that my scoring picks up on titles that have very good episode ratings, while the overall title rating may just not be so good. Here's an example, of what I mean: https://www.serieshue.app/Title/tt13847564

The title has a score of 8.5, which is really good, but it's episodes have mostly a score of above 9, which makes it one of the greatest shows of all time.

To me that's a feature of the rating and I'm fine with that, but here comes another anomaly into play: It seems like Indian people tend to rate the episodes more than the rest of the world does. This means that the top 25 list is dominated by Indian shows. (9/25 at the time of writing this)

Now, I'm no expert and maybe the series Inspector Avinash from above is really great, but since it's in Hindi only and runs on a site called JioCinema, I most likely won't watch it. 😉

One way to solve it would to just limit the top 25 list to English shows, but that would be a bit unfair to the rest of the world. So I decided for a different approach where I added small origin country flags to their titles.

This gives you an indicator of where the show is from and you can decide for yourself if you want to watch it or not. In the same breath, I also added a plot summary for the top 25 shows, so you can get a better idea of what the show is about.

Mostly because I had to use an external API for that. The imdb data export only has very rudimentary information about the titles and the country of origin and the plot summary are not part of it. So I had to use the OMDb API to get that information. I'm still very happy with the app as it is and I don't think I'll add any new features in the near future. At the moment it's very stable and is very low-profile to run, which is perfect for a side project. 🙂