Not sure if it makes things easier than your current setup, but take a look at Mediathekwebview.de

https://mediathekview.de/ or https://jdownloader.org/jdownloader2

my dirty method with wget, fzf, pueue and yt-dlp put this in e.g. .bashrc

myytdlq () { wget -k $1 -O /tmp/myytdl.tmp; cat /tmp/myytdl.tmp | perl -pe 's/\"/\n\"\n/g; s/\\u002F/\//g;' | grep -v hoerfassung | sort
 -u | fzf -m --query "http video" | cat > /tmp/myytdlq; export MYYTDLQ=$(cat /tmp/myytdlq); clear; echo $MYYTDLQ; for i in $MYYTDLQ; do 
pueue add -- "yt-dlp  --restrict-filenames    --output '%(extractor_key)s-%(title).40s.%(ext)s'  $i"; done }

and use it with the url of the series

myytdlq https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/113212-001-A/this-is-england-86-1-4/

Have you tried jDownloader? If normal link search doesn't work, try the deep search (or get into the websites source code and search for the media file and input that into jDownloader).

I hardly download from them, so I don't have an automated way.

What I do is use ublock origin to look at the network calls, find the media link and then use curl to download it.

For any content from French TV you can use Captvty https://captvty.fr/

yt-dlp can download playlists and such. Have you tried using a link to some overview page or some such? Either way, how many videos can a series on arte have? 5 or 6? How that can be called tedious is beyond me.

Don’t know if it works for this but have you tried jdownloader 2? That’s what I use for most things. It can scrape pages and maintains a download queue

https://github.com/fnep/mtv_dl mtv_dl allows searching the Mediathekview database from the command line and download all videos that haven't already been downloaded and that fit the search. I use it to download new episodes from TV shows that I'm interested in