On the statistics page, there is an overall count of non-special episodes watched and how that compares to the total number of such episodes available. It is of the form n1/n2.
TMDb administrators insist that, once they assign an originating network to a show, it doesn’t matter where episodes are airing first now, the only episode “debut” that counts for assigning an episode air date is the first airing on their assigned network. For a show like “Midsomer Murders”, this means an episode airs on Acorn months before it airs on ITV, but no episode air date is assigned until it airs on ITV. I often watch such episodes long before they air on ITV. As it should, Moviebase lets us mark such episodes as watched when we actually watch them, even though they don’t yet have an assigned air date in TMDb.
However, when we do mark such an episode watched, it is not counted in that overall progress count on the statistics page. That somewhat makes sense because such episodes are not yet reflected in the total episodes to be watched count due to their not showing an air date yet. I could accept this behavior except that when the episode is actually assigned an air date, it doesn’t appear that either of those counts is updated when I already have it marked as watched. Also, once that episode receives an official air date, it doesn’t matter if I un-mark the episode as watched or re-mark it as watched, neither of these counts change. That’s a problem. Note that the episodes are counted in the overall count of episodes watched that appears elsewhere in on the statistics page.
I would like to propose a solution for this. I believe following this logic would keep the counts as they should be.
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If we mark an episode without an air date as watched, then increment both counts in the overall progress count; that is change n1/n2 to n1+1/n2+1.
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if we change such an episode to unwatched before it receives an air-date, then decrement both the counts; that is change n1/n2 to n1-1/ n2-1.
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When an episode is assigned an air date, if we have already marked that episode as watched, then do nothing to the counts. They should already be correct. If we have not already marked the episode as watched, then increment just the total number of episodes to be watched in the overall progress count; that is change n1/n2 to n1/n2+1. The latter is what happens now for episodes once they are assigned an air date and we have never already marked them as watched.
I think this approach would make the counts always make sense and would avoid the error that is occurring now when we mark an episode as watched early and the counts never get corrected later.
Some screen shots to try to illustrate this follow:
