Administrators should be able to merge shows when a duplicate record is found. This would allow for the transfer of things like followers and ratings from one show record to the other without users losing track of a show that they thought they had followed and without losing ratings.
I don't think that a show-merge feature needs to be complicated. The main thing to focus on is a way to transfer followers and ratings from one show record to another when a duplicate is found and needs to be eliminated. It would also be nice if there were an easy way to transfer AKAs from one record to another, or to automatically use the show name on a duplicate record as an AKA on the show record you want to keep when the names vary.
It would probably not be necessary to merge things like episode and season information as part of the automated merge feature.