The “Credit only” situation

It has always struck me as unfair and quite deceptive actually, for tv series particularly, how the “credit only” credits are displayed.

If a person is credited for all episodes of a series but appears in none of them, they are still listed at the top of the cast list, above those who actually contributed. Furthermore, the episode number that displays also repeats this lie which leads the reader to believe without further investigation, that they did appear in that episode. It is only when you go into the episode detail that you can get the true picture.

This is quite a glaring issue for a show like “Neighbours” which credits its entire regular cast in every episode, but only features roughly half. For a series with so many episodes, I think that number is important - for example, I’ve recently been adding credits to “Brookside” and the number of episodes I input for the actor Kenneth Cope was then used in a BBC News obituary for him later that week. Currently IMDb is not giving the reader any simple way of knowing just how many episodes an actor has done if the series uses credit only, so if the show displayed all regular cast every episode that 171 episodes would likely have been quoted in the news as something like 700. It’s just not truthful.

To my mind, “credit only” should be displayed just the same as uncredited. It’s still acknowledging the credit, just like you are still acknowledging the appearance of someone without a credit, but without inflating the figures and giving a false impression to the reader.

Thoughts?