Ask around: "which show has the most episodes?" You'll hear The Simpsons, One Piece, maybe Grey's Anatomy. All three are far behind. And the gap is instructive, because it says something about what we call "a show".
The numbers, from our database
Here's what our cache holds for a few titles — the same data used to compute members' progress:
- One Piece — 1,181 episodes. Impressive, and still nowhere near the top.
- NCIS — 508 episodes.
- Grey's Anatomy — 465 episodes.
- The Walking Dead — 177 episodes.
- Game of Thrones — 73 episodes.
- Breaking Bad — 62 episodes.
- Stranger Things — 42 episodes.
Now the top of the table: Emmerdale, a British soap running since 1972, is past 10,000 episodes. Jeopardy! is near 9,400, Home and Away 8,700, EastEnders 7,200.
Why soaps crush everything
A daily soap produces five episodes a week, without pause, for decades. Fifty years at that rate mechanically beats any season-based show. So the comparison is a bit of a trap: an Emmerdale episode runs 25 minutes, a Game of Thrones episode up to 80.
That's exactly why we compute watch time in hours, not episodes. 62 episodes of Breaking Bad is roughly 47 hours; 1,181 episodes of One Piece is over 470.
The game: your intuition against the numbers
We turned it into a game, because this is precisely the kind of knowledge people think they have. Two shows appear: say whether the one on the right has more or fewer episodes than the one on the left. A correct call keeps the run going, a miss ends it.
The counts aren't estimates: they're from our database, the same ones that tell you where you stand in a show. A second mode swaps episodes for the public rating, which is a wholly different exercise — and often harder.
And if you want the number for YOUR show
Every page shows the real count, season by season, with the time you have left. Look at One Piece to measure the scale of the job, or Breaking Bad if you'd rather have something doable in a fortnight.
Play Higher or lowerWhat if we count in hours?
Episode count is the wrong unit, and that's why the ranking above is misleading. Converted to duration, the ratios change completely.
- Breaking Bad — 62 episodes of about 47 minutes: close to 49 hours.
- Game of Thrones — 73 episodes, but running up to 80 minutes: over 70 hours.
- One Piece — 1,181 episodes of ~24 minutes: beyond 470 hours, nearly twenty days non-stop.
- Emmerdale — 10,000 episodes of 25 minutes: over 4,000 hours, a figure that stops meaning anything on the scale of a viewer's life.
That's why every WatchTrail page shows time remaining in hours rather than an episode count: "38 hours to catch up" is something you can act on. "47 episodes" isn't.
The special-episode trap
One last detail that explains the gaps between sites: season 0. Recaps, Christmas specials, making-ofs, webisodes — catalogues file them in a special season, and depending on whether you count them, a show's total moves by dozens of episodes.
On the site, season 0 exists but stays collapsed by default and doesn't enter the progress calculation: otherwise a "finished" show would never reach 100%.