A collection of television and film associations

Description

This is a collection of people and media (TV shows and films), and associations between them, e.g. Kristen Schaal was an actor in Last Man on Earth.

You can look at lists of people and see their associations with media; and you can look at lists of media and see their associations with people.

You could start with a person, for example. Tony Hale; or you could start with film or TV show, for example. Shrill. Then, just follow the links.

If you refresh the page, you will see a new example and suggestions above.

Background

I watch a lot of television. I can get preoccupied with the people involved. I recognise someone from something I watched once, but I can't put my finger on it. I look people up to remind me of the connections. One thing leads to another. I might make a few other connections, and maybe I'll have a new list of shows or films to watch. And so on.

The feeling of recognising someone but not being able to identify them, or the show/film they were in, bugs me.

I've noticed that, while there are many disparate connections, there are also pockets of people who do things together fairly regularly. Take a look at Broad City, for example, and see where that takes you.

There are also many people, mostly actors, who are very familiar to you but, for one reason or another, you don't know their name. These are people I'm really interested in. Their filmographies are often very lengthy; a testament to their acting ability.

I thought it might be interesting to record this.

I started with Tinderbox, creating notes for people and media (i.e. TV and Film) and making named links (actor, writer, etc.) outwards from people notes to the related media notes.

To be added to the file, I must have watched the show or film, and I should want to include it. I can't swear to it, but I think I've enjoyed everything in the list reasonably well. None of this is an endorsement: Heartbeat isn't on the list (yet). While I might be happy watching re-runs, and ticking off the who's who, my partner knows it for what it is...

The Tinderbox document quickly became unwieldy. You can click on the left/right side of the images below to see more/less detail.

I moved to PostgreSQL, with which I have some familiarity. The model is straightforward (image below). Keywords aren't implemented. These would be words like "comedy," "drama." That sort of thing. Which might help with searches.

I've lost the visual representation that Tinderbox provided, and I'm dwelling on that. Without any concrete idea of their suitability, I suspect a graph database is likely to be a step forward, or rather backwards, to the Tinderbox map view. I've found that area of computer science is challenging to penetrate. Anyway, something for the future.

This isn't IMDB; it's not a record of everything that ever was. It's just my cherry-picked subset of information related to a subset of everything I've watched, providing I can remember I watched it. Whatever it was. It is far from being an exhaustive representation of the time I've spent in front of a screen.

It would probably be helpful to include pictures, but I'm afraid you'll have to do that yourself if you're curious. If you're lucky, I'll have added a link to the wikipedia page for the person, show or film. But I'm lazy, so don't count on it.

I included this wikipedia URL as a database modelling hack. It's quite common for shows and films to share names, and it's not unheard of that people share names. The URL can add uniqueness to a row when it's necessary. And it is helpful, so not a bad thing. I considered adding more information about a person, e.g. date of birth or some significant location, but I don't care about that, and it would have been a massive pain in the neck to gather the required information (I run a no-nulls shop), and like I said, I'm lazy.

Finally, I've used the Yii2 PHP Framework to create this website. This is a great tool, and I'm glad I found it.