Referencing one documentary in a series

I have written about how to cite TV series and films before (here and here), but not how to cite a single TV show.

Why have I not tackled this before? Ah, well, there is no time like the present!

The APA 7th edition publication manual guides us (American Psychological Association, 2019); in the Reference Examples chapter, Audiovisual Media section, it is suggested that we use specific writers and/or directors for particular episodes of a series. We use the writers and the directors for each episode (and this is where Wikipedia or IMDB come in very handy).

However, what about a DOCUMENTARY series? Where the writer and directors are not listed? Trickier - and yes, I recently had to reference one episode of a documentary series. I had already consulted the APA manual (2019), which suggested using the Executive Producers. OK, a starting place. Let's see what other gurus suggest. 

I checked out Caulfield (2026), who suggested the following framework: 

Writer last name, Initials. (Writer), & Director last name, Initials. (Director). (Year, Month Day). Episode name (Season Number, Episode Number) [TV series episode]. In Executive producer initials. Last name (Executive Producer), Series name. Production Company.

Except - as we already know - I had no writer or director. But a good point about how to format the season and episodes. So I checked out APA Style Blog (2026) which provided the following example:

Favreau, J. (Writer), & Filoni, D. (Director). (2019, November 12). Chapter 1 (Season 1, Episode 1) [TV series episode]. In J. Favreau, D. Filoni, K. Kennedy, & C. Wilson (Executive Producers), The Mandalorian. Lucasfilm; Golem Creations.

OK. So after a trawl through Wikipedia, IMDB, Netflix and Variety, I gathered all the components required - I hope correctly - and put together the following reference:

Barry, J., Donovan, E., Grosso, C., Heckman, M., Levy, S., Mumm, C., Olsen, M. W., Patel, N., & Warren, J. (Executive Producers). (2022, June 28). The Future Of Sports (Season 1, Episode 8) [Documentary series episode]. In The Future Of. The Verge; 21 Laps; Vox Media Studios.

There are a PILE of Executive Producers. Because I couldn't find the EPs were responsible for separate episodes, I thought it best to give them all credit. And - again - because they are one list, we don't need to repeat them as series EPs as well for this one episode. We also need to include all the production companies, separated by a semi-colon.

And I think that will do!

Sam

References:

American Psychological Association (2019). Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association: The official guide to APA style (7th ed.). Author.

APA Style Blog. (2026). Film and Television References. https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/references/examples/film-television-references

Caulfield, J. (2026). How to Cite a TV Show in APA Style | Format & Examples. Scribbr. https://www.scribbr.com/apa-examples/tv-show/