Talk:NOVA

Just like with Frontline the official Nova site breaks up the show by calender year when really the seasons break down like normal shows and the episodes run from September to March and then take a six month break. Well after like 1979 anyways before that it ran from January to June than took the six month break. It would be preferable if you broke it up that way as those are the true season breaks. --The-jam

FRONTLINE's established numbering system actually does follow the Autumn-Spring convention, see Talk:FRONTLINE/Season Twenty-Four. NOVA also has an established system, but it has gone January-December since season 3. The titles and numbers are found at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/listseason/ where Arctic Passage, for example, links to http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/listseason/32.html#3211. If you search the web for "Mystery of the Megaflood" 3211 you'll find that all the TV stations and other "official" sources use the same system. Quadpus 21:35, 14 April 2006 (EDT)

Well it's a function of the definition of the word season. A season is a set of episodes aired between long breaks or hiatuses. NOVA takes a multi-month break every summer just like most other American television shows but between December and January there is only maybe a month with no new episodes. I don't know why they break their website up the way they do but it doesn't make sense to break them by calender year when there's a clear season break in the summer. We want to keep the definition of season consistant on this site. Some shows don't have any clear season breaks in which case it's episodes are broken up by calender year (see The Daily Show) but since NOVA has clear breaks there is no need to do it that way. --The-jam 17:42, 20 April 2006 (EDT)

The problem is that it isn't just their website breaking them up that way, they have an official numbering system that says "Mystery of the Megaflood" is episode 3211, and every tv station and other episode guide i've seen uses that system as well. I think they take a break during the summer because that's what everyone else does. Are you sure that a season is defined by having long breaks in between? If NOVA used the word "Series" instead maybe it would make more sense? -- The consensus on The TV IV:Proposals/Season_or_Series seems to be to use whatever convention the particular show uses - IMO that should extend to using their numbering convention as well. Quadpus 15:49, 21 April 2006 (EDT)

Okay I did a little reasearch and it seems NOVA (and other PBS shows) break their programs down by year because they are federally funded and the Coporation for Public Broadcasting has to make annual reports on what programs they funded each year and every TV station pulls their list from the same master list released by PBS. This restriction doesn't apply to us and it really doesn't make sense in terms of why the word season is used for TV it used in the same way it's used in phrases like the rainy season, the baseball season, the hockey season, the theater troop's season, etc. Uninterrupted cyclic periods of time when some form of event occurs not necessarily contained in a calender year. New episodes of NOVA don't air throughout the year or else the word wouldn't apply at all like with talk shows that air year round and don't refer to anything as a season. Using the word series would be needlessly confusing since that's a word only used in Britain in this context and NOVA is an American program. In America series refers to all the episodes of a show ever not smaller sets of episodes. Oh and that discussion you linked is a little out of date it seems since then that even British shows use Season not series on the site(see Category:BBC). --The-jam 17:34, 21 April 2006 (EDT)

Fair enough, and thanks for doing that research. I'm wondering where might be a good place to put the official numbers then, as I think it would be good to have them available somewhere. "Production Number" is awfully official-sounding, and my first instinct is to put the official numbers there, but that goes completely against the current usage which is as a simple numbering of the episodes in the order they aired. Is that really necessary to have? It would help if all these terms were added to the Glossary Quadpus 18:53, 22 April 2006 (EDT)