Best Boy

You liked a show, so you look up the director. Maybe the lead. That is where almost everyone stops: one name, printed above the title. Best Boy reads the rest of the credits. Pick the executive producers, the cinematographer and the writers from something you love, and it traces everything else those people made, drawing it as a map that grows every time you hop.

Follow a cinematographer and you end up somewhere new

An executive producer decides what a show is before a frame is shot. A cinematographer decides what it looks like. Their taste is all over other work you have never heard of, because nobody navigates by them. Start from Severance and keep Jessica Lee Gagné, its director of photography, and the first thing back is Escape at Dannemora, which she also shot and Ben Stiller also produced. Every result names who connects you to it and in what role. Click one and it becomes the new start; the map keeps everywhere you have been.

Each role counts for as much as it decides about the work

A credit says someone worked on a thing, not how much they shaped it. Best Boy weights each role by how much it decides what a show or film is, so a creator outweighs an editor and a plain producer credit counts least:

Creator, showrunner

1.4

Director

1.3

Executive producer, writer, cinematographer

1.2

Editor

0.8

Composer

0.75

Producer

0.5

Some people are attached to everything. Ben Stiller executive-produces his production company's whole slate, so a trace from Severance would otherwise drown in his credits. Each person's share of the results is capped, and titles that two or more of your picks both worked on are exempt, because that overlap is what you came for: work made by the same team, not everything one famous name ever touched. When three people keep turning up together, a panel calls it out as The Company.

Deep Cuts goes looking for what almost nobody watched

One switch turns the vote count from a floor into a target. Trace The Crown and Deep Cuts opens on a 2014 British TV film about the comedian Tommy Cooper, rated 6.9 on 14 votes, made by the show's executive producer Andy Harries and one of its directors, Benjamin Caron. The rating still counts, because sorting on obscurity alone returns broken records and abandoned pilots.

This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.

Best Boy is free and stays free. It runs on The Movie Database's open API, whose license covers non-commercial use like this one, so charging would mean a different license and a different project. There are no accounts and it collects nothing about you. If it finds you one film you would not otherwise have watched, it has done its job.