NewEpisodes

How NewEpisodes works

The home page is a single dense wall of stills. At the top, under the heading, a strip marked Up next shows nine series that have more episodes on the way. Beneath it a black bar holds a row of tabs: top rated, new shows, comedy, drama, family, British and one season. Then comes the grid, five stills across, in four groups divided by year tiles: 2024 to 2026, 2021 to 2023, 2018 to 2020 and 2015 to 2017. Each still carries the starting year in its corner and, on a black bar along the bottom, the title and a coral count of seasons and episodes.

A series page gives the years of broadcast, the rating, the genres, the leading cast, the creators and a summary. Below these come the seasons, each with its episodes listed by number, title and first air date. A small control lets a viewer mark the episode reached. Beside the Watch now button is a country selector; choose a country, press the button, and the series opens on JustWatch, which lists the subscription, rental, purchase and free services that carry it there. NewEpisodes is a guide, and the watching happens on those official services.

Four routes lead to a series, described in Finding a series: the tabs, the search box, the lists page and the alphabetical index. The search understands season and episode numbers, so a title followed by season 2 episode 3 leads to the right page. The list feature is called My Shows; it keeps series to follow in the browser on the device in use, and the My Shows page explains how it works.

Comedy

Comedy is the largest list, with ninety-eight series, and the comedy guide begins with the comedy that thought hardest. The Good Place, created by Michael Schur, opens with a woman named Eleanor waking in a pleasant waiting room and being told that she has died and, thanks to a life of good deeds, has arrived in the better of two possible destinations. She knows there has been a mistake. Across four seasons and fifty episodes the series becomes a course in moral philosophy disguised as a sitcom, with Kristen Bell and Ted Danson, and it ends exactly when and how it means to. It is rated 8.0.

Schitt's Creek, created by Eugene Levy and his son Dan, strips a wealthy family of everything except a small town they once bought as a joke, and installs them in its motel. The parents, played by Levy and Catherine O'Hara, and their two grown children arrive vain and helpless and leave, six seasons later, as people worth knowing, changed by a town that refuses to dislike them. The final season won every major comedy award in a single evening.

Workplaces remain the sitcom's natural home. Superstore spent six seasons and 113 episodes among the staff of a big-box store in St. Louis, finding comedy in price checks, loudspeaker announcements and the customers glimpsed between scenes. St. Denis Medical films an Oregon hospital in the mock-documentary style, Great News places a producer's mother as an intern in her own newsroom, and Blockbuster imagines the last video shop in America.

Family comedies of the period widened the family. Fresh Off the Boat, set in the Orlando of the 1990s and drawn from a chef's memoir, ran for six seasons. The Neighborhood moved a relentlessly friendly Midwesterner next door to a sceptical Los Angeles patriarch, played by Cedric the Entertainer, and with 155 episodes is one of the longest runs in the catalogue. Georgie & Mandy's First Marriage follows a young Texan couple from an earlier hit, The Upshaws a working family in Indianapolis, and Acapulco a young man's first job at a glamorous Mexican resort in 1984, told in two languages.

Some comedies are built on a single odd idea. Schmigadoon! traps a couple of backpackers in a town where everyone behaves as though in a stage musical of the 1940s. The Big Door Prize installs a machine in a grocery shop that tells each customer their true potential on a small blue card. Man vs Bee gives Rowan Atkinson a luxurious house to look after and one insect to pursue through nine short episodes, and Man vs Baby repeats the dose with an infant. Staged, made during the months when theatres were dark, has David Tennant and Michael Sheen play versions of themselves rehearsing by video call and squabbling about billing.

Drama

Ninety-four series are dramas, and the drama guide starts in hospital, where the decade's most popular network series were set. The Good Doctor follows Shaun Murphy, a young surgeon with autism and an exceptional visual memory, from his first day as a resident in California through seven seasons and 126 episodes. Freddie Highmore plays him with great precision, diagrams bloom on screen when he sees a solution, and the series, adapted from a Korean original, holds the highest rating in the catalogue at 8.5.

The Resident, rated 8.4, takes a sharper look at how a hospital is run, through a senior resident in Atlanta who puts patients before paperwork. New Amsterdam, rated 8.3, gives the oldest public hospital in New York a new medical director whose first question to everyone is how he can help. Newer wards include Brilliant Minds, inspired by the writings of a famous neurologist, PULSE, set in a Miami trauma centre, and Doctor Odyssey, which puts its clinic on a cruise ship.

A second strain of drama prefers small towns and second chances. Sweet Magnolias follows three lifelong friends in a South Carolina town through children, careers and a shared pitcher on the porch. Chesapeake Shores brings a New York career woman home to a family inn in Maryland, and Sullivan's Crossing, rated 8.1, sends a surgeon back to her father's campground in Nova Scotia. These are gentle series, made with good scenery and steady hearts, and they have devoted audiences.

Love stories told across time form a third group. One Day visits the same two people on the same July date for twenty years, fourteen episodes that many viewers finished in a weekend and remembered for months. From Scratch follows an American art student in Florence who falls for a Sicilian chef and marries into his family. Dash & Lily sets a courtship by notebook loose in New York in the week before Christmas, and My Life with the Walter Boys moves a girl from Manhattan to a Colorado ranch with ten new housemates.

The decade also produced drama of ideas. Severance, rated 8.4, imagines an office whose workers have agreed to have their memories divided, so that the self at the desk knows only the desk. It is a mystery, a satire of working life and, at its centre, a story of friendship among four colleagues who decide to find out what their company makes. Queen Sugar, created by Ava DuVernay, follows three siblings who inherit a sugarcane farm in Louisiana, and A Gentleman in Moscow confines a count, played by Ewan McGregor, to a grand hotel for thirty years.

Family

Thirty-four series are for the whole household, and the family guide notes how many of them are returns. Fuller House brought the children of a much-loved sitcom back to the same San Francisco home as parents, for five seasons. Raven's Home did the same for a girl who glimpses the future, across 122 episodes, and iCarly found its web hosts grown up. The new The Wonder Years moved the format to a Black family in Alabama in 1968, and Little House on the Prairie returned to the frontier in 2026.

Children's books supplied some of the best new work. The Baby-Sitters Club adapts the novels about a group of friends who start a business in a Connecticut town; it is rated 7.9 and is admired by parents as much as by its intended audience. The Mysterious Benedict Society recruits four gifted orphans for a secret mission, and The Spiderwick Chronicles opens an old house full of creatures. The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance returns to a world built entirely with puppets, ten episodes of astonishing craft rated 7.8.

Sport gives families something to cheer. Big Shot sends a hot-tempered college basketball coach, played by John Stamos, to a girls' school, where he learns as much as he teaches. The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers starts a team for the children who were cut from a famous one. Free Rein, rated 7.9, brings an American girl to an island off the English coast and a horse that will trust only her, and Zero Chill and Spinning Out take to the ice.

Younger viewers have a long shelf of bright comedies from the children's channels, among them Andi Mack, rated 8.0, about a girl whose family has a secret, BUNK'D: Learning the Ropes, set at a summer camp in Maine and, at 161 episodes, the longest series here, Stuck in the Middle, Bizaardvark and Bella and the Bulldogs, whose heroine becomes her school's quarterback.

Science fiction and adventure

Twenty-seven series look beyond the everyday, and the science fiction guide divides them into ideas, quests and time. The series of ideas are led by the severed office and by Foundation, a vast adaptation of Isaac Asimov's novels about a mathematician who predicts the fall of a galactic empire and plans to shorten the dark age that will follow. Travelers, a Canadian series of three seasons, sends the minds of agents from the future into people of the present at the moment their lives were about to end.

Quests supply colour. Willow returns to a fantasy kingdom thirty years after a favourite film, with a new band of young heroes. Knuckles gives a red echidna from a video game six episodes of road comedy. The Librarians: The Next Chapter guards magical objects, and The Santa Clauses asks who will take over at the North Pole when its present occupant retires.

Time travel had a good decade. Quantum Leap revived the story of a scientist who jumps from life to life putting right what once went wrong, and The Winchesters is a prequel about how two parents met. Space is represented by Away, in which a commander played by Hilary Swank leads the first crew to Mars, by two Star Trek entries, and by the comedy Moonbase 8, about three trainees who would like to go anywhere at all.

British series

Twenty-nine series come from the United Kingdom and Ireland, and the British guide explains their particular shape. British seasons are short, often six episodes, and are written by one or two people from start to finish, which gives them a distinct voice. Derry Girls, written by Lisa McGee from her own teenage years, follows four girls and one bewildered English cousin at a convent school in Northern Ireland in the 1990s. Its nineteen episodes are rated 8.1, and its final hour is as moving as the rest is funny.

All Creatures Great & Small, rated 8.2, is the gentlest success of the period. Adapted afresh from the memoirs of a country vet, it begins in 1937, when a young Scotsman takes a job with an eccentric practice in the Yorkshire Dales. Each episode brings a cow in difficulty, a farmer short of cash and a view of green hills, and the household at the surgery becomes one of the warmest families on television.

British comedy of the decade was sharp about ordinary pressures. Motherland is set at the school gate, among parents who are barely keeping up. Trying follows a London couple through the long process of adopting a child, with great tenderness and many laughs. Stath Lets Flats concerns the least competent lettings agent in the capital, Peter Kay's Car Share takes place almost entirely in a car on the way to work, and The Goes Wrong Show stages a new play each week in which everything that can collapse does.

Other British entries include Geek Girl, about an awkward schoolgirl spotted by a model agency; The Flatshare, in which two strangers share a flat in shifts; Still Up, a friendship conducted by telephone in the small hours; Funny Woman, about a beauty queen from Blackpool who heads for the television studios of the 1960s; and Upstart Crow, which treats Shakespeare as a harassed commuter from Stratford.

Period drama

Twenty-two series are set in the past, and the period guide sorts them by century. Royalty leads. Victoria begins on the morning an eighteen-year-old learns that she is queen and follows her through marriage, children and the politics of the 1840s across three series. The Spanish Princess tells of Catherine of Aragon's arrival in England and the years before her story became a famous divorce.

High society has seldom been so well upholstered. The Gilded Age, created by Julian Fellowes, sets old New York families against new railway money on either side of a street in 1882. The Buccaneers follows American heiresses to London in the 1870s, Belgravia: The Next Chapter returns to a fashionable square, and Sanditon completes a novel that Jane Austen left unfinished, about a seaside town with ambitions. The Other Bennet Sister, new in 2026, gives the overlooked middle daughter of a famous family her own story, and Dickensian lets characters from many novels share one London street.

The twentieth century has its own shelf. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, rated 8.1, begins in 1958, when a Manhattan wife whose husband has walked out discovers on a small stage downtown that she can make a room laugh. Her climb through the clubs of New York, in a succession of superb coats, lasted five seasons and won a great many prizes. Julia follows a cookery writer as she invents the television cooking programme in the early 1960s, and Genius devotes each season to a different great figure of science, art or music.

Smaller histories are told in The English Game, about the mill workers and old Etonians who shaped football in 1879; Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker, about a pioneering businesswoman; Harley and the Davidsons, about a motorcycle workshop in Milwaukee; and Jamestown, about the first English women to arrive in a Virginian colony.

Workplace

Thirty-three series are set at work, and the workplace guide shows how the setting serves both comedy and drama. Beyond the hospitals and the shops there are studios: Reboot reunites the quarrelsome cast of an old sitcom, The Grinder sends a television lawyer home to join his family's real firm, and The Chair gives Sandra Oh the leadership of a struggling university English department for six tightly written episodes.

Offices of every kind appear. Loot gives a newly single billionaire, played by Maya Rudolph, a charitable foundation she had forgotten she owned. Mr. Mayor elects a retired businessman to run Los Angeles. Lucky Hank follows a professor in a small Pennsylvania college, For the People a group of young lawyers in a federal court, and The Great Indoors an adventure reporter moved to a desk among colleagues half his age.

School and teen

Thirty-one series are about the young, and the school guide gathers them. High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, rated 8.0, is set at the real school where a famous film was shot, among pupils staging their own version of it; over four seasons it launched several careers in music. School of Rock turns a class into a band, and Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist lets its heroine hear other people's feelings as songs.

Growing up is treated with more honesty than before. Bel-Air retells a beloved 1990s comedy as drama, Swagger follows a fourteen-year-old basketball prospect and his coach, and Colin in Black and White looks back at a quarterback's school years. Doogie Kamealoha, M.D. gives a sixteen-year-old doctor in Hawaii the usual problems of sixteen, and Elle, from 2026, visits a famous law student in her school days.

Revivals and returns

One feature of the period deserves a section of its own: the return of old favourites. As services competed for attention, a familiar title became valuable, and series that had ended decades earlier were brought back, usually with some of the original cast. Frasier sent its radio psychiatrist home to Boston for a third act. Night Court reopened a Manhattan courtroom under the daughter of its former judge, with one veteran prosecutor now arguing for the defence. The Odd Couple put a new pair of mismatched flatmates on a familiar sofa.

Science fiction joined in with the leaping scientist and with Heroes Reborn, and family television with the grown-up web hosts, the psychic mother and the full house in San Francisco. How I Met Your Father retold a famous premise from the other side, and Mystery Science Theater 3000 returned to its orbiting cinema with new hosts and the same wisecracking robots.

A revival is a conversation between two periods. Part of the audience arrives knowing every old joke, and part arrives fresh. The best of them, including several here, find a reason to exist beyond nostalgia, usually by asking how their characters have changed. For a household, they offer a rare thing: a series that parents and children can each claim as their own.

True stories on television

The limited series proved an ideal form for real events. WeCrashed follows the founders of a company that rented out shared offices and briefly seemed set to change the world. Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker gives Octavia Spencer four episodes as a laundress who built a business in hair care at the start of the twentieth century. The New Edition Story traces a boy band from a Boston housing estate to the charts, and Young Rock lets a famous wrestler and actor look back at three stages of his own youth.

Sport offers The English Game and Colin in Black and White, science and art the anthology of great lives, and cookery the story of the woman who taught a nation to make an omelette on air. In each case eight or ten hours allow room for the minor figures and false starts that a film must cut, which is why true stories have migrated so happily to television.

Song and dance

Musical television, once rare, became common in these years. Besides the school putting on its own show, the town trapped in a stage musical and the programmer who hears feelings as songs, the catalogue includes Little Voice, about a young songwriter in New York, and Step Up, which continues a dance film franchise at an arts school in Atlanta. The Muppets Mayhem finally sends a famous puppet band into the studio to record its first album.

These series ask a great deal of their casts, who must act, sing and often dance within a television schedule, and they tend to be made with visible joy. A household with a young performer in it will find them especially welcome.

Comfort viewing

A phrase much used in this period was comfort viewing, meaning a series returned to for its mood as much as its plot. The catalogue is rich in them. The Yorkshire vets, the porch in South Carolina, the Maryland inn and the Nova Scotia campground all offer scenery, kindness and problems that can be solved within the hour. The motel town and the philosophy comedy offer characters who grow steadily better.

Comfort is sometimes mistaken for a lack of ambition, yet these series are difficult to do well. They depend on casting, on tone held steady across years, and on writers who like their characters. Viewers repay that care with loyalty, and several of the longest runs in the catalogue belong to this group.

The people behind them

Certain names recur in the credits. Michael Schur, who created the philosophy comedy, has a long record of humane workplace series. Julian Fellowes wrote both the story of early football and the saga of New York society, and inspired the return to the London square. Amy Sherman-Palladino brought her rapid dialogue to the Manhattan of the 1950s. Ava DuVernay oversaw seven seasons on the Louisiana farm, with every episode directed by a woman.

Among performers, Ted Danson appears twice, as a celestial architect and as a mayor. John Stamos leads a basketball comedy and a comedy about a bachelor who discovers he is a grandfather, Grandfathered. Tim Allen returns to the North Pole, Kelsey Grammer to Boston, and Rowan Atkinson to the business of being defeated by small things. Jenna Ortega, later a star, is the middle child of seven in a Disney comedy, and Olivia Rodrigo sang her first songs in the school musical. The search box will find any of them.

How series arrive now

It helps to know the three ways a modern series is released. The first is all at once: every episode of a season appears on the same day, and viewers set their own pace. The second is weekly, the traditional rhythm, which keeps a series in conversation for two months. The third is a mixture, with two or three episodes to begin and the rest weekly, or a season divided into two parts.

The episode list on each page shows first air dates, so the pattern is easy to see. A season whose episodes share one date was released whole; a season whose dates fall a week apart was shown in the old way. For series still in production, dates appear on the list as they are announced.

Choosing by age

For young children, the bright comedies from the children's channels and the puppet series are the natural start, along with the camp, the horse on the island and the mouse-sized adventures of the creature house. From about ten, the school musical, the babysitters, the secret society of gifted children and the sports teams suit well. Teenagers will find the Northern Irish schoolgirls, the reimagined Californian mansion and the romances of the ranch and the six summers.

Adults have the widest choice, from the severed office to the Manhattan comedienne, and many series work for several ages at once. The hospital dramas are watched by whole families, the Yorkshire vets by three generations, and the philosophy comedy by anyone old enough to enjoy a good argument about right and wrong.

Good pairings

Some series sit well side by side. The Yorkshire practice and the Nova Scotia campground make an evening of fresh air. The Manhattan of 1958 and the New York of 1882 show the same city three generations apart. The two Rowan Atkinson comedies can be watched back to back in a little over two hours. The superstore and the video shop are companions in retail, and the two revived sitcoms set in Boston and Manhattan make a nostalgic double bill.

For contrast, try the severed office after an episode of the mock-documentary hospital: two workplaces, one bright and one eerie, each asking what people owe to their jobs. My Shows will remember where each was left.

The network sitcom, alive and well

Reports of the death of the traditional sitcom were premature, and the catalogue proves it. Filmed before an audience or in the newer single-camera style, the half-hour family comedy kept its place on the networks throughout these years. Life in Pieces tells four short stories about one extended family in each episode. American Housewife ran for 103 episodes in a wealthy Connecticut town where its heroine feels like the only ordinary person. Single Parents forms a support group out of a school car park, and Man with a Plan sends a contractor, played by Matt LeBlanc, home to look after his own children.

Stand-alone comedians anchored several: Mr. Iglesias in a Long Beach high school, Dr. Ken in a medical practice, Marlon in a friendly divorce, and The Crew in a stock-car racing garage. Family Reunion, rated 8.0, moves a Seattle family to their grandparents' town in Georgia, and mixed-ish and Schooled continue the stories of earlier hits in the 1980s and 1990s. Country Comfort installs an aspiring singer as nanny to a rancher's five children.

At the gentler edge of the form sit Joe Pera Talks With You, in which a choir teacher from the upper Midwest speaks softly about breakfast, beans and autumn drives, and Detroiters, a comedy about two friends who make local television advertisements and love their city. Superior Donuts is set in an old Chicago shop, LA to Vegas on a weekend flight, and Merry Happy Whatever across one family's holiday week.

Where the stories happen

The settings of these series form a wide map. New York appears in three centuries, as a city of new mansions, of nightclubs and of hospital corridors. Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle and San Jose each have a hospital or a comedy. The American small town is everywhere, in South Carolina, Maryland, Texas, Louisiana, Pennsylvania and Colorado, and Canada answers with its own on the Atlantic coast and far above the tree line.

Britain is shown in equal variety: the Dales with their dry-stone walls, a seaside resort under construction, a London of school gates and rented flats, a city on the Irish border in the 1990s. Beyond that lie a Mexican resort, a Sicilian kitchen, a Moscow hotel, a galaxy-wide empire and one very pleasant neighbourhood that turns out to be something else entirely. A viewer in search of a particular landscape can type its name into the search box, which reads the summaries as well as the titles.

A series for each season

Because many series have episodes tied to the calendar, the catalogue can follow the year. Autumn suits the school series, which usually open with a first day of term. December has the notebook romance in the bookshop, the family at the North Pole and the single holiday week of the Quinn household, along with the Christmas episodes that long comedies stage every year. Spring belongs to the lambing season in Yorkshire, and summer to the camp in Maine, the surfers of Victoria and the six summers of the lake romance.

The episode dates on each page make it possible to find a seasonal episode quickly. Many households keep one or two favourites to revisit at the same time each year, and the mark placed on an episode in My Shows is a convenient way to remember which.

How to judge a first episode

With so much to choose from, viewers often decide on the strength of one episode, and a little allowance is wise. A first episode has a great deal to do. It must introduce half a dozen people, set a tone and promise a future, usually in under an hour. Comedies in particular tend to find their rhythm a few weeks in, once the writers have learned what the cast does best; the superstore, the motel town and the philosophy comedy all grew funnier as they went.

A fair test is three episodes for a comedy and two for a drama. Limited series are the exception, since they are written as one long film and their openings are more deliberate. The season and episode count on every still helps here too: a series of six episodes can be sampled and finished in the time it takes to decide about a longer one.

The art of the ending

One reward of this period is that many series were allowed to end properly. The philosophy comedy closed after four seasons with a finale its creator had planned from the start. The motel town chose its own last day. The Manhattan comedienne took her final bow in a fifth season that jumped decades ahead to show where everyone landed. The young surgeon's story concluded after seven years with a look into his future.

A planned ending changes how a series is watched. Knowing that a story will be completed, a viewer can invest in it with confidence, and the last episode becomes an occasion. The lists for one season and for five seasons or more are both, in their different ways, lists of stories that reached their final page.

Even series that ended sooner than their makers hoped often leave a satisfying shape behind. A single season of ten or thirteen episodes usually resolves its main question, and writers who sense that time is short tend to give their characters a graceful exit. That is one more reason the one-season list is worth exploring with an open mind: it holds complete small stories as well as famous limited series, and a viewer can know from the count on the still exactly how much of an evening, or a week, each will ask for.

For those who enjoy company while they watch, a series followed at the same pace by a friend or a relative in another city becomes a standing appointment. Agreeing on two episodes a week and comparing notes afterwards restores something of the old weekly rhythm, and the episode marker keeps both viewers honest about how far they have reached.

One season and done

Sixty-six series are complete in a single season, and the one-season guide treats them as the novels of television. Some were planned that way. A limited series tells one story in six or eight episodes and ends, which has drawn film actors and directors to the form. The count in his hotel, the two lovers on their July date and the pioneering businesswoman all belong here, as does Thai Cave Rescue, a careful account of the boys' football team brought out of a flooded cave in 2018.

Others simply ended early and are worth finding anyway. Pitch imagined the first woman to play in the major baseball leagues. Making History sent three friends back to the eighteenth century in a duffel bag. The Astronauts launched five children by mistake, and Dear Edward followed a twelve-year-old and the strangers linked to him by one event. A single season asks little of a viewer's time and often gives a great deal back.

Long runs

Nineteen series lasted five seasons or more, and the long-run guide recommends them to anyone who likes to settle in. The three hospital dramas account for more than three hundred episodes between them. The comedies of the superstore, the motel town and the two neighbours add another three hundred and fifty. Family favourites supply the rest, together with the Yorkshire vets, the London couple and the Louisiana farm.

A long series offers a pleasure the short ones lack: watching people change slowly. A resident becomes an attending surgeon, a shop assistant becomes a manager, a child at camp becomes a counsellor. Because these series were made over many years, the actors age with their characters, and a viewer who watches at leisure sees a small lifetime pass.

Still running

Twenty-five series have more episodes on the way, and the still-running guide lists them. The strip marked Up next on the home page shows nine. Among the dramas are the severed office, the galactic saga and the mansions of old New York; among the comedies, the young Texan couple, the foundation and the golf lessons of Stick, with Owen Wilson as a former professional coaching a teenage prodigy. Chad Powers, rated 8.0, disguises a disgraced quarterback as a walk-on player.

The newest arrivals are dated 2026. They include Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, Every Year After, a romance told across six summers and rated 8.3, Finding Her Edge, set in the world of ice dance, and the two revivals mentioned above. For series still in production, the episode list on each page grows as new dates are announced, and the mark a viewer places on the last episode watched stays where it was put.

Four groups of years

The grid on the home page is divided by year, and the same four lists appear on the lists page. Forty-eight series began from 2015 to 2017, when traditional networks were still strong and a comedy might run for a hundred episodes. Forty-six began from 2018 to 2020, as new streaming services launched one after another and each wanted a family drama, a prestige comedy and a nostalgic revival of its own.

The fullest group, fifty-three series, dates from 2021 to 2023, when production returned in force and the limited series was at its height. Twenty-seven began from 2024 to 2026. Seen together, the groups show seasons shrinking from twenty-two episodes to ten or eight and budgets rising to match, a change that suits viewers with limited evenings.

Top rated

Twenty-eight series are rated 7.8 or higher by at least a hundred voters, and the top rated guide ranks them. Medical drama takes three of the first five places. The young surgeon leads at 8.5; the Atlanta resident and the severed office follow at 8.4; the New York hospital stands at 8.3 and the Yorkshire vets at 8.2. Three series share 8.1, and a further group stands at 8.0, among them the philosophy comedy and the school musical.

Ratings for the newest series rest on fewer votes and may settle over time, so the vote count on each page deserves a glance. As a rule, a series that has kept a high score across five or six seasons has earned it many times over.

Beyond Britain and America

Although most of the catalogue comes from the United States and the United Kingdom, a few series travel further. Canada supplies the time-travelling agents, the Nova Scotia campground, a hospital drama called Nurses and North of North, a comedy set in an Inuit community in the high Arctic. Australia sends Colin from Accounts, in which a dog brings two strangers together, and Surviving Summer, about a New Yorker among the surfers of Victoria.

Nigeria appears twice, with Far from Home, rated 8.1, about a scholarship boy at an elite school in Lagos, and Seven Doors, a drama of a man called to a throne. Mexico is the setting of the resort comedy, and Italy, Thailand and Russia provide the backdrop for three of the limited series. Television in this period became international almost by accident, as services released their programmes everywhere at once.

Planning what to follow

A catalogue of nearly five thousand episodes calls for a little planning, and the counts on each still are there to help. A viewer with a free weekend can choose from the one-season list, where many titles run six or eight episodes. A household that watches one episode with dinner will get through a twenty-episode comedy season in a month. Those who like to keep two series going at once often pair a half-hour comedy with an hour-long drama.

My Shows keeps the plan in order. Add each series being followed, mark the last episode seen, and the list page shows at a glance where things stand. Because the list lives in the browser on one device, a shared tablet or the family computer is the natural place for a household's list.

What a series page contains

The page for a series on NewEpisodes is organised from the general to the particular. A wide still sits at the top with the title and the span of years. Tags name the kinds of story, and the score is shown with its number of votes beside the totals of seasons and episodes. The summary explains the starting point in a few lines and goes only as far as the first episode does. Creators and leading cast follow, each name linked to other series in the catalogue. Then the seasons unfold one after another, every episode with its number, its title and the date it was first shown, and a marker that can be set on any of them. The country selector and the Watch now button are placed above the episode list so that they are always within reach.

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