When TV Time wound down, the crew here didn't just want a new app. They wanted their years back. As I write this, Deadman Reef has restored more than 1.77 million episodes and counting. Here's the honest story of how, and why it was trickier than it looks.
The problem: a checkmark isn't enough
Bringing back a watch history isn't just ticking boxes. To set someone back exactly where they left off, every episode has to land on the *right* episode of the *right* season of the *right* show. Get the mapping wrong and you don't just lose a checkmark, you tell someone they're on the wrong episode of a show they love.
Why episode matching is hard
A few things make this genuinely difficult at scale:
- Numbering isn't universal. Some series, a lot of long-running anime especially, are numbered absolutely, so "episode 131" might be season 5, episode 1 somewhere else. Treating a count as a number quietly corrupts the history.
- Titles drift. The same show can carry slightly different names across catalogues, so matching on text alone misfires.
- Scale punishes small mistakes. A rule that's 99% right still misplaces thousands of episodes across a million-episode import.
How Deadman Reef handles it
Instead of trusting counts, the importer works against real season-and-episode ranges, keeps a shared source of truth for how each series is numbered, and flags the titles it *couldn't* confidently match rather than guessing. When something didn't line up, we'd rather show you than silently misplace it. That's why the number keeps climbing without the history getting messier.
Why it matters for you
The upshot is simple: when you import from TV Time, your history comes back where it belongs, and the cases we can't be sure about are surfaced, not swept away. That's the difference between "a lot of checkmarks" and "your actual watch history."
Bring yours home
If your TV Time export is still sitting in a downloads folder, this is what it's for. Import it here, or read the step-by-step guide first.