We are loving the crew
I am building on top of Day 1. Today was about building the connections between shows through their crews. TMDb defines “crew” as anyone credited on the series who is not on-screen cast. Examples are production crew, costume & make-up crew, etc.
TMDb exposes two endpoints, credits and aggregate_credits. credits sits at the series level. aggregate_credits rolls up every episode credit and returns an episode count per person.
I excluded casting roles because they created connections between shows that have nothing to do with each other.
Observation
The crew relationships worked when I tested them. Westworld and Person of Interest surfaced, and they share J.J. Abrams and Jonathan Nolan.
Next Up
I may tackle role weighting and per-episode cast counts tomorrow. aggregate_credits gives me an episode count per person, which is enough to weight on, but it only gives a total. It cannot tell me which episodes someone appeared in. For long-running TV shows, the cast and crew may change over the series. That may influence the quality of the show, so I want to capture that. The initial role weighting will be interesting to consider later on.
See you tomorrow for Day 3!
For a more in-depth explanation, read this ADR.