[will_critchlow]

This is a fascinating read - and an adventure down the rabbit-hole.

I think they missed an opportunity to make the IDs map 1-1 with human-readable titles though. They use the argument that they have many versions of "pride and prejudice" and don't know which they may have in the future, but that sounds to me like a cop-out. There must be something differentiating those different shows to viewers (else, why make them?) so refer to that, surely? That doesn't mean /prideandprejudice2, but whatever differentiates that series from the first one.

I'm not particularly addressing this from a search perspective (they address that in the post) but more from a UX / readability / shareability perspective.

There's a few other pieces of weirdness to my mind e.g. "And hacking back to /episodes would have returned what? A list of all episodes ever?"

Yes. That's similar to what /programmes is isn't it? Obviously you can segment / add hierarchy.