The Hayate no Gotoku (Hayate the Combat Butler) anime has 3 television seasons (a fourth one was announced for later this year), a movie, and an OVA. However, the different seasons don't match up very well and there is a lot of filler content. For instance, the ending of the first season seems to take place after all of the events of the second season.
Can someone shed some light on what is canon and what are filler, and what order they occur in the manga?
Season 1: having 52 episodes, follows the manga from volume 1 (chapter 1) to volume 4 (chapter 51).
Season 2: having 26 episodes (the OVA being episode 00), follows the manga from volume 5 (chapter 52) to volume 14 (chapters 147-148).
Season 3: having 12 episodes, features a new story written in part by the original creator and is mostly based on his original ideas that never made it to the manga.
The movie: I really could not understand whether it was an adaptation or new material/filler content.
If you compare the length of the first and second series with the number of chapters each covers, you can see that the second one follows the manga much closer than the first one, the latter mixing up the storyline from the manga with new content. Plus, from what I gathered from here, episodes 18, 19, 26, 27, 28, 29 (the end), 30, 31, 32 (first part), 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 45, 46, 48, 50 and 51 of Season 1 are fillers, and only the last episode of Season 2 is a filler.
The third season is not based in any manga.
And the movie, I really do not know.
As for the timeline, from what I gather, it goes something like this:
Season 2 (of which the OVA is episode 00) retcons the events from Season 1, being set a month (or three, according to this source) after Hayate's become Nagi's butler (not a year, like the first season states. Thus, it follows more closely the manga). The film's events take place towards the end of the summer holidays, 2 weeks after Comiket. Season 3's events take place one month after the movie's (which is nine months after the beginning of the Season 1 and 6 months after Season 2).
This would mean that Season 1 and 2 intertwine (because of the original/filler content present in Season 1), the movie takes place 5 months after Season 2, and Season 3 takes place one month after the movie (and the OVA is part of season 2, being its episode 00).
