About FROO

FROO lists television and film franchises in the order they were first released — down to the broadcast date, and where two things went out the same night, down to the slot. This page is about who makes it and how the dates are arrived at, because a list of dates is only worth as much as the method behind it.

Who

My name is Matt Large, and I make FROO. It is one person’s project: hand-written HTML, CSS and JavaScript with no framework, and a set of Python tools that build the episode tables from the data I keep. Nothing here is scraped and published unread.

If something is wrong, I would rather know. There is a feedback form, and corrections get made.

Why release order

The value of a franchise is in the places it crosses over with itself, and those crossings were written to make sense in the order they came out. Watch a franchise in its internal chronology instead and the story arrives out of sequence: a character turns up already changed by something you have not seen, and a two-part event staged across two series lands with its halves the wrong way round.

Release order is also genuinely hard to reconstruct, which is the other reason this site exists. Streaming services present a franchise as separate shows. Some of it is spread across providers. And a lot of it comes down to what the schedule looked like at the time, which is the part nobody keeps.

What “first release” means here

It is shorthand for the order a contemporary audience would have experienced something. How much that matters depends on how much is in play at once.

Where only one series or film is running, the obvious date is used and nothing is agonised over. Where several strands run in parallel and cross over, one clock is picked and stuck to — usually the US first run — because a single coherent source is the only thing that makes a shared night orderable at all.

Time of day is the tie-break, not the network. A streaming episode dropping a minute past midnight comes before an episode broadcast at eight that evening. That is why the Yellowstone page ranks a Paramount+ prequel ahead of that night’s Yellowstone, and why Supernatural puts the Ghostfacers webisodes ahead of the episode they went out alongside.

A genuinely different first audience is worth following, because that is the case the rule is for. The reimagined Battlestar Galactica’s first season had finished on Sky One before America saw its third episode, and the 1978 theatrical cut played Canada seventy-one days before ABC showed the pilot. Both are on the page at those dates.

Never trust a cast list

This is the rule I would most like anyone to take away from the site: a credited cast list is not evidence that a character appears.

Fandom episode pages and IMDb both routinely credit a season’s regular or guest cast on episodes the character is not in. Trusting them on the Jurassic page once put Lewis Dodgson in seven episodes he is absent from, including one that comes after he has been eaten. So an appearance has to be established from a plot summary, an episode recap, or a character page’s own list of appearances — and where a wiki marks something “credit only”, that is believed.

The same caution applies to a wiki’s own crossover category, which is a starting point rather than an answer. The 9-1-1 wiki’s missed one half of two different two-part events, and included a crossover with a show outside the franchise entirely.

Where the dates come from

Episode tables mostly start from Wikipedia’s list articles, checked against IMDb’s published bulk datasets and the relevant fan wiki. Where those disagree, the disagreement is the interesting part, and it gets resolved rather than averaged: the reasoning is written down against the series, and the notes under each franchise’s table say what was decided and why.

Same-night ordering comes from network schedule grids, and where those do not reach — the Syfy Monday that ran three shows back to back, for instance — from press releases and daily listings of the time. For the 1970s ITV sitcoms on the Man About the House page there are no national listings at all, because each ITV region scheduled its own night; those dates are London/Thames transmissions, read off the billing for the evening.

Running times come from IMDb’s published figures, except where IMDb itself says a figure includes advertising — a Dutch broadcast slot with the adverts left in is not how long an episode is. Where a runtime genuinely is not published, the cell is left empty and the totals say how many entries they could not count. Empty is not zero.

What the site does with your data

Almost nothing, and the privacy page says so in detail. Ticking episodes off is stored in your own browser. If you switch syncing on, your device invents a code, and what the server holds is a one-way hash of that code against some bytes it never opens — no account, no email address, nothing that identifies anybody. Nobody can recover a lost code, deliberately.

What is still wrong with it

Plenty. The link columns are incomplete on several pages. The notes under the table exist on ten franchises so far and are being written for the rest. Six Thursdays in late 1978 remain unsettled on the Man About the House page, and they are marked unsettled rather than guessed at. Where this site does not know something, it tries to say so.