TVReviewer
Information Architecture · Field Notes

The blueprint
of the building.

Two things live here. A lean review desk — the criticism that's ours. And a streaming guide built on one repeatable rule, designed to grow from 153 titles into a complete, browsable record of everything on television: service first, then genre, then show.

153
Active titles catalogued
9
Streaming services
27
Genre indexes
190
Guide pages, all index.html

The review desk

Live · June 2026

TVReviewer was just stripped back to its purpose — television criticism. The awards-season machinery (Oscars, Emmys, BAFTAs, festival ledgers, guild pages) moved to its proper home at tvawardshows.com. That cut the site from 1,375 pages to 346 and retired 1,029 duplicate pages. What remains is review coverage that's genuinely ours.

tvreviewer.com/ ├── reviews/ Show & season verdicts — the core 11 ├── showrunner/ Creator deep-dives — the Taylor Sheridan universe 20 ├── fnl/ + friday-night-lights/ Clear eyes, full coverage 105 ├── landman/ Permian Basin prestige ├── now-streaming/ · watch/ What's worth your time ├── news/ The TV news desk 131 ├── behind-the-show/ · reviewers/ · critics/ Craft & the masthead └── guide/ ★ the streaming guide — see below 190 ┄┄ oscars/ · emmys/ · festivals/ … → retired to tvawardshows.com

The streaming guide

Built & live · /guide/

Borrowed from TVShowDB and rebuilt as a browsable directory. The rule is simple and absolute: service → genre → show, and every level is an index.html. Pick a service, pick a genre, land on a show — where to watch, its airtime, what the top critics said, and a subscribe link for the service.

tvreviewer.com/guide/paramountplus/drama/yellowstone/index.html    // service → genre → show

Anatomy of a show page

The repeatable unit

Every one of the 153 show pages follows the same shape — that's what lets the guide scale to thousands of titles without touching the template. Only the data changes.

/guide/paramountplus/drama/yellowstone/index.html
Watch linkDeep link straight to the title on the service
Airtime / statusStreaming, or live broadcast time — plus Returning / New / Ended
Critics panelLive search links to NYT, Variety, THR, Vulture, IndieWire, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic — and TVReviewer's own take
Subscribe CTAAffiliate-ready signup button for the service
RelatedOther titles in the same service + genre

Why this shape

One address per show, forever. The path is stable — link it, share it, rank on it. Seasons and reviews accrue beneath it without the URL ever moving.

Genres are indexes, not owners. A genre page lists shows; it doesn't store them. Re-shelving is a one-line change — exactly the discipline that avoids the duplication we just cleaned up.

Reviews here, where-to-watch here, awards there. The guide answers "what's on and is it any good"; tvawardshows.com handles ceremonies. Clean lines.

The five rules

So it scales without sprawling
i.

Service first

The top shelf is the streamer: /guide/<service>/. It mirrors how people actually decide what to watch — "what's on Max tonight?"

ii.

Then genre

Within a service, /<genre>/ indexes the titles. Drama, comedy, western, reality — the second turn of the wheel.

iii.

index.html everywhere

Every directory resolves to a clean, slash-terminated URL. No .php, no query strings — static, fast, indexable.

iv.

Data drives pages

The whole tree regenerates from one shows.json. Add a row, rerun, and the title, its genre, and its service indexes appear.

v.

Every show earns a review

Each page routes to the critics and to our own desk — the guide feeds the reviews, the reviews give the guide a spine.

From 153 titles to all of television

The guide is generated, not hand-built — so growth is just data. Expand shows.json with the rest of each service's catalogue (every Netflix original, every Prime series), rerun the generator, and the directory fills itself in: new genres, new show pages, new cross-links, all in the same shape. Next up: refresh airtimes to live data and drop in real affiliate IDs per service.

Open the guide → Front page