IMDb should update its policy on individual genre/popularity data for episodes of anthology series

To clarify, when I say "anthology series", I am not speaking of shows like True Detective, Black Mirror, or The Twilight Zone, where the episodes are connected by similar themes and tend to conform to the same style and genre. I'm referring specifically to that rare (and nearly extinct) type of anthology series that has the format of a serialized program but lacks any unifying theme or genre. Examples of this type of anthology series include American Playhouse, Kraft Theatre, Playhouse 90, The United States Steel Hour, Play of the Week, and Schlitz Playhouse. To a lesser extent, it also applies to more well-known series like The Magical World of Disney and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which are unified somewhat in terms of style, content and/or target audience, but not so much in genre.

As most of you probably already know, IMDb does not store genre data for individual episodes of TV series. Rather, genres are added to the parent series and automatically applied to the individual episodes. The purpose of this policy is to "reduce duplication of the existing data", as described on the help page. Instead, IMDb has a work-around: rather than adding genres to specific episodes, users can submit genre-related keywords (e.g. "musical-episode", "western-episode", "horror-episode", "animated-episode"). This workaround is usually perfectly adequate for dealing with occasional one-off episodes of sitcoms and other long-running series that only rarely deviate from their predominant genre(s). But for the type of anthology series I'm concerned with, this workaround is totally inadequate. There is no overarching genre for "American Playhouse"; each individual episode tells its own story, with its own set of genres. It is impossible to choose a set of genres that accurately applies to the majority of episodes.

To illustrate why this is an issue, I would like to present one particular example as a case study: the 1982 "episode" of American Playhouse The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez (later released as a feature film). In 2022, this highly acclaimed Western adventure drama was inducted into the National Film Registry as a feature film. Somebody created a new title page for it, perhaps not knowing that a title page already existed on IMDb. Recently, however, somebody noticed the duplicate and merged the feature page into the TV episode page. Here is where the problems begin. Now, instead of being designated as Adventure, Drama, and Western, the title bears the genres ascribed to its parent series: Comedy, Drama, Romance and Sci-Fi. The only one of these genres that fits this title is Drama. It's definitely not a comedy, romance or sci-fi movie. In addition to the genre issue, this title now no longer sorts by popularity or shows up in search suggestions. Normally, individual TV episodes are obscure enough that these things don't tend to become an issue for very many people. But for a title included in the National Film Registry, which by necessity exists alongside many other feature films and shorts, the inaccuracy of the data becomes readily apparent.

Allow me to quote from a comment I made on another post:

You'll notice that the genre data on this title currently marks it as Comedy, Drama, Romance, and Sci-Fi. The only one of these genres that fits this specific title would be drama. Notably missing from this list is "western". Why is this a big deal? Well, to throw out one example, supposing someone comes along and does an advanced search wanting to see a list of all the Westerns in the National Film Registry? Well, you'll notice that "The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez" doesn't show up. Then again, if you do the same search but with Sci-Fi instead of Western, you will see it... right between Blade Runner and Return of the Jedi. If you fail to see how this is somewhat of a less than ideal situation, I really don't know what else to tell you.

You can also see how the lack of popularity data is an issue when attempting to sort NFR titles by popularity. Even when shown in descending order, the title's status as a "TV-episode" causes it to automatically be buried under 940 other titles regardless of what its actual popularity level would indicate.

It goes without saying that it is extremely rare for a title designated as "TV-episode" on IMDb to make it onto a highly prestigious film-related list such as the National Film Registry. It is less rare, however, for titles such as this to be sought out by users, included in their ratings or lists of favorite movies, or sorted into lists for some other reason. The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez is not the only instance where this policy becomes a problem, I only highlighted it to illustrate a point. Although the vast majority of TV series throughout history stick to the same basic genres from episode to episode, there are some notable exceptions to this rule. The inability to store accurate data for these instances is a problem, and for this reason the policy should be updated - if not for all series, then at least it should be updated to allow for exceptions to be made.