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.
- What is this all about?
- Why is show x not on here?
- Why is a show in more than one franchise?
- Wait a minute! Crusade isn’t in release order?!
- Where do the dates come from?
- How can I support FROO?
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 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:
- have several shows, films or other pieces to it — NCIS and its spin-offs, say;
- cross over meaningfully between them, or be story-dependent across them. Magnum, P.I. and Murder, She Wrote crossed over exactly once, which is not enough to make them one franchise;
- and not be obviously orderable already. The Die Hard films are four films in a row, and you did not need me for that.
Q: Why is a show in more than one franchise?
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 — so both versions are here. Or take NCIS: there is NCIS and its spin-offs, the wider Bellisario-verse that takes in JAG, and the Lenko-verse of Hawaii Five-0, MacGyver and Magnum P.I. alongside it. They all cross over at various points, and I can easily see somebody wanting just one of the three, so all three are here.
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.
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: 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. 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.