FROO.

FROO - Frequently Asked Questions

The whole site rests on one claim: there is only one correct order in which to watch a franchise, and that is the order it was released in. I suppose I had better explain myself.

Looking for how to use the site - ticking episodes off, choosing your series, syncing between devices? That is all on the Help page.

Q: What is this all about?

Sometimes you want to watch a whole franchise — or, if you are here, more likely rewatch one. That is harder than it sounds, because 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. To get the best of the thing, you need to know what that order was.

And that order is genuinely hard to find. Streaming services present a franchise as a shelf of separate shows. Some of it is spread across different providers. And a good deal of it comes down to knowing what the television schedule looked like at the time, which is the part nobody keeps. That is what this site is for.

Q: Why are franchise (re)watches so hard?

Partly because the order is genuinely hard to reconstruct, which is the answer above. Mostly, though, because it is nobody’s job to make it easy. A streaming service is built to sell you a title rather than a franchise: the catalogue is arranged by programme and by season, and nothing in it can say that an episode of one series belongs between two episodes of another. Rights are split, so a good part of a franchise is usually somewhere else entirely. And the detail that settles most of the difficult nights — what the schedule actually looked like at the time — was never anybody’s to keep.

None of that would be hard to fix. It is simply not a priority for the people who could. So I have written an open letter to the streaming services asking for the two things that would make franchise watching work properly, and in the meantime this site does the job by hand.

Q: Why is show x not on here?

One of two reasons: I have not got to it yet, or I do not think it is a franchise.

To count as a franchise here, and so to earn a full release-order list, something has to:

Q: Where does a franchise end?

Deciding what counts as a franchise at all is the easy half. The hard half is where you draw the edge of any particular one, and sometimes there is no single honest answer.

Some are simple. Buffy and Angel is the film, Buffy and Angel, and all of it depends on the rest of it.

Others are not. Star Wars has a long tail of shorts and micro-series, and whether you want those in a rewatch is a perfectly reasonable thing to disagree about. Or take NCIS: there are NCIS and its spin-offs, JAG before them, and the Lenko-verse of Hawaii Five-0, MacGyver and Magnum P.I. alongside. They all cross over at various points, and I can easily see somebody wanting just one part of it.

So each franchise is one page, drawn as wide as it goes — Star Wars with every short, NCIS with JAG and the Lenko-verse — and Choose series, above the table, switches off whatever you are not watching. The order stays the same and so do your ticks.

Obviously my own view is always the broadest set going :)

Q: Wait a minute! Crusade isn’t in release order?!

First, I reserve the right to break my own rules whenever I feel justified. But it is a fair catch, and it has happened exactly once.

A handful of episodes are listed in an order other than the one they were transmitted in, and only where the predominant creative voice — J. Michael Straczynski, in the case of Crusade — vehemently disagreed with the order a distributor imposed, and has stuck by that ever since. It should stay very rare, and where it happens the page says so.

Q: Where do the dates come from?

Wikipedia’s episode lists to begin with, checked against IMDb’s published datasets and the relevant fan wiki, and against the network schedules where two things went out the same night. Where the sources disagree — and they disagree more often than you would think — the disagreement gets resolved rather than averaged, and the reasoning is written down.

Each date is the day an episode was first shown in its home country, which for most of the site means the US. There are no times or time zones in the data, so an episode dated for a Tuesday may reach you on the Wednesday, or weeks later, depending on where you live and who shows it there. The same goes for anything the site shows as coming up next: that is the US first-run date, not when it will be on near you.

The About page goes into the method properly, including the one rule I would most like people to take away: a credited cast list is not evidence that a character appears in an episode. Several franchise pages also carry a note under the table explaining what was decided for that franchise and why.

Q: Can I put FROO on my home screen?

Yes. On an iPhone or iPad, open froo.watch in Safari, tap Share, then Add to Home Screen. On Android, and in Chrome or Edge on a computer, the browser offers to install it, and Preferences & Sync has an Install FROO button when it can. It then opens in its own window, with its own icon.

The lists you have opened keep working without a connection, ticks included, and anything you tick offline syncs when you are back. On an iPhone or iPad the home-screen copy keeps its own list, separate from the one in Safari, so turn on sync in Safari first and enter the same code in the home-screen copy when it opens. It asks for it.

Q: Why did you ask me about cookies?

Because from 5 September 2026 the site offers Google Analytics, that does set a cookie, and asking is the only honest way to add one to a site whose privacy page reads the way this one does. Say no and nothing is counted and no identifier is created. As it happens no Google script is fetched whichever way you answer — the tag runs on Cloudflare’s servers rather than in your browser — but the measuring itself only happens if you agree to it. Nothing on the site changes either way, and you can change your mind whenever you like.

A cookieless page counter has run since August and is not part of the question, because it stores nothing on your device and cannot tell two visits apart. That turns out to be its limitation as well as its virtue: it can say that pages were opened, and nothing whatever about whether anybody came back. The privacy page sets out exactly what each one does.

Q: How can I support FROO?

Three ways, and only one of them involves money.

Tell somebody. This is the one that actually helps. FROO has no marketing behind it and barely registers in search results, so it spreads by one person sending a link to another. If you know somebody about to start a rewatch, that is worth more to the site than anything else on this list.

Post how far you have got. Every franchise page has a Stats button, and the Stats page covers the whole site; both offer a Copy shareable stats button that puts a line on your clipboard — the franchise, how many entries you have watched, the percentage, and a link back. On a phone it opens your share menu instead. Put it wherever you post things. It explains what this place is more efficiently than I can.

Put something in the jar. There is a Ko-fi page. There is no advertising on the site at the moment, nothing here is behind a paywall, and the running costs are small — so this is genuinely optional and everything stays exactly the same whether or not anybody uses it. It is a plain link, too: no embedded widget, no script, nothing added to the privacy page.

And if you would rather help by making the site better, the feedback form is open. Corrections are the most welcome thing that arrives, and every entry’s Notes box has a Spotted a mistake? link that opens the form with that entry already filled in.