Unless they’ve been elided, there were no indices other than the PK on any table, and no additional statistics. There are correlated columns here: a given country may have produced more movies in a given range of years, as its movie industry built up; a given country may produce more TV series than movies, etc.

Nearly every time I’ve seen someone resorting to hints for a query, it’s because their statistics are incorrect. Adding hints is papering over the problem, and can backfire later if the data shape changes.

Mentioned elsewhere but classic ml seems the right tool for this problem