My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic
2010–2019
222
episodes
Bones
2005–2017
?
more, or less?
TV episodes
Two of 122 — one shows its episodes, the other hides it. Say whether the hidden one is more or less and keep going. A tie counts as correct; one wrong answer ends the run, including a near miss within 10%.
How long a show ran is not a thing anybody keeps track of. What stays is how much of a life it took up: the years it was on, the friends who watched it too, the night the finale aired. None of that is counted in episodes, and the episode count turns out to measure something else entirely, which is where and when the show was made.
That makes the guess feel rigged. Sherlock, which filled a decade of British newspapers, made thirteen episodes; Mr. Bean made fourteen. Friends, the sitcom by which every other sitcom is measured, made fewer than Two and a Half Men. Teletubbies made more than four hundred, and nobody has ever watched a Teletubbies marathon.
Why the intuition fails
The count is set by a commission, not by success. An American network season in the years of Friends and ER ran to twenty-two or twenty-four episodes, because that is what filled the calendar between September and May. A British series ran to six, because one writer or two wrote all of it. Blackadder made four series and a handful of specials and came to twenty-seven; the American Office, adapted from a British one of fourteen, ran to more than two hundred.
Cable and then streaming shortened the order again. Game of Thrones and Stranger Things were the most talked-about shows of their years and made ten episodes a season or fewer, with a long wait between each. Their size was in the budget, not the count, and Game of Thrones, which ran for eight years, ends up nearer to Downton Abbey than to Friends.
At the other end, children's television is cut short and made in bulk. Oggy and the Cockroaches runs seven minutes an episode, and the first Thomas stories ran five, so a year's work fills a shelf. Nobody remembers an episode, only the show, and it was on every morning for years: Thomas & Friends, Oggy and Teletubbies each run to hundreds.
What the data is and what it is not
The list is every television series with at least fifty pages across Wikimedia's projects that has ended, and pages in many languages favour shows that were dubbed and sold abroad. So American network drama, cartoons and anime are well represented, and so are South Korean dramas and Brazilian telenovelas, which travelled as widely. British comedy, which mostly did not, has fewer places than its reputation would suggest.
Ended matters because a running count is wrong the week after it is written. What nearly went wrong was the shows that ended and did not stay ended. Family Guy was cancelled in 2002 and came back three years later; Scrubs came back in 2026. Each still carried its old end date, so each would have passed as finished. A show that started again after its last end date is now left out, and Futurama, whose end date is only a season's, is left out by hand.
Questions
- What counts as an episode?
- Whatever Wikidata records as the series’ number of episodes, which is usually the count on the show’s episode list. That leaves room for disagreement: a feature-length special may or may not be one, a two-part story may be one or two, and a preschool show often counts each short segment. No count here has been adjusted, because adjusting it would be choosing a number the source never gave.
- Why is my show missing?
- Most likely it is still running. Only shows that have ended are in the pack, so The Simpsons, Doctor Who and Bluey are not. After that: it has fewer than 50 pages across Wikimedia’s projects, the bar for recognisable, which The Wire only just misses; or it ended and came back, like Family Guy and Scrubs; or its record gives two counts with nothing to say which is right.
- How accurate are the counts?
- An episode count is about as checkable as a figure gets, since anyone can count the list, and the ones here mostly agree with it. Where they differ it is over what an episode is rather than how many there were, and over revivals, which some records count and others give an entry of their own.
- Why do some cards say USA?
- Because a British player has a different show in mind. The years beneath each name come from the record, from the first start date to the last end date. Where a better-known show shares the name, as the British Office and the BBC’s House of Cards do, the card names the country as well, written by hand.
- Does the pack change?
- Rarely. Every show in it has finished, so its count has stopped moving, and the pack is marked evergreen rather than given a refresh timer. A revival is the exception: a show that comes back leaves the pack until it ends again. A regeneration re-runs the same query and rewrites only what changed.
- Can I play it without JavaScript?
- You can read all of it and see the opening pair, because the page is built as HTML before anything runs. Guessing needs JavaScript, since there is no server to send a guess to.
Where the figures come from
Wikidata, under CC0 1.0. Retrieved 2026-09-22.
Television series with at least 50 Wikimedia sitelinks, so every show is recognisable on sight (brief §15), and only shows that have ended: a show with no end date, or one that started again after its last end date, is left out, because a running count is out of date as soon as it is written. Futurama is left out by hand for the same reason, since the end date it carries is a season’s. Episode counts are the best-ranked figure, and a show stating more than one is left out rather than given a number we would have to choose. Where a revival was made as part of the same series, its episodes are counted. The years beneath each name are the show’s first start and last end date.
Stickers and patterns drawn from Fluent Emoji by Microsoft, and Phosphor Icons. Fluent Emoji © Microsoft Corporation, and Phosphor Icons © 2023 Phosphor Icons, both under the MIT License.