Talk:Cheers season 3

A fact from Cheers season 3 appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 2 January 2013 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the third season of Cheers has a new psychiatrist, a pregnant waitress, a romantic childless triangle, and a dead coach?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2013/January.

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"Rescue Me"

There is a clear consensus to redirect Rescue Me (Cheers) to this article. Armbrust ^{The Homunculus} 10:32, 9 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

This episode article, individually notable or not, shall not depend on inherited notability. The whole episode is already covered in this season article. Coach's appearance is already covered in the season article, and there is no need to have an article about an episode that is not independent from the show. This episode is no exception. --George Ho (talk) 21:43, 3 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. One of that article's references points back to the same Wikipedia article (probably some kind of mistake, but not one I could fix), another just gives the Nielsen ratings, and the third is a review of the entire season which also mentions the "Rescue Me" episode. Our coverage of the episode is longer than the coverage in the source. All of that is already sufficiently covered in this article, so we can just as well redirect. Huon (talk) 14:22, 4 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

You're correct that for the vast majority of TV shows, individual episodes do not automatically inherit notability from the parent series. There are some exceptions, of course — for some cult series with obsessive fandoms (Star Trek, The Simpsons, etc.), the show actually gets written about in such exhaustive and minute detail that there are enough reliable sources out there about most individual episodes to warrant individual articles, and even a series whose episodes mostly don't qualify for individual articles can have the odd one that does (e.g. Ellen and "The Puppy Episode".) As a rule, however, most individual episodes of a TV series should be discussed only in the context of a merged episode list, and not as standalone articles.

This one is a perfect example: its only genuinely reliable source is an article about the Nielsen ratings for the week of broadcast, and its only other sources are a DVD review of the entire season and a "reference" link back to itself — which means that the only source for which the episode itself is the subject of the coverage, and not merely a passing mention within an article about something else, is an invalid source since we're not allowed to reference stuff back to ourselves.

That, as always, is the core criteria by which we determine whether an episode qualifies for its own article or not: are there reliable sources out there which are specifically about the episode itself? The answer here is no, so redirect. Bearcat (talk) 19:50, 4 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.