How to aggregate data without group by - mysql

Question

I am having a little bit of a situation here.
The environment
I have a database for series here.
One table for the series itself, one for the season connected to the series table, one for the episodes connected to the seasons table.
Since there are air dates for different countries I have another table called 'series_data` which looks like the following:
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `episode_data` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`episode_id` int(11) NOT NULL,
`country` char(3) NOT NULL,
`title` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
`date` date NOT NULL,
`tba` tinyint(1) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
KEY `episode_id` (`episode_id`),
KEY `date` (`date`),
KEY `country` (`country`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;
Now I am trying to collect the last aired episodes from each series in the database using the following query:
SELECT
*
FROM
`episode_data` ed
WHERE
`ed`.`date` < CURDATE( ) &&
`ed`.`date` != '1970-01-01' &&
`ed`.`series_id` = 1
GROUP BY
`ed`.`country` DESC
ORDER BY
`ed`.`date` DESC
Since I have everything normalized I changed 'episode_id' with 'series_id' to make the query less complicated.
What I am trying to accomplish
I want to have the last aired episodes for each country which are actually announced (ed.date != '1970-01-01') as the returning result of one query.
What's the problem
I know now (searched google, found not for me working answers here), that the ordering takes place AFTER grouping, so my "date" ordering is completly useless.
The other problem is that the query above is working, but always takes those entries with the lowest id matching my conditions, because those are the first ones in the tables index.
What is the question?
How may accomplish the above. I do not know if the grouping is the right way to do it. If there is no "one liner", I think the only way is a sub query which I want to avoid since this is as far as I know slower than a one liner with the right indexes set.
Hope in here is everything you need :)
Example data
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `episode_data` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`episode_id` int(11) NOT NULL,
`country` char(3) NOT NULL,
`title` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
`date` date NOT NULL,
`tba` tinyint(1) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
KEY `episode_id` (`episode_id`),
KEY `date` (`date`),
KEY `country` (`country`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;
INSERT INTO `episode_data` (`id`, `episode_id`, `country`, `title`, `date`, `tba`) VALUES
(4942, 2471, 'de', 'Väter und Töchter', '2013-08-06', 0),
(4944, 2472, 'de', 'Neue Perspektiven', '2013-08-13', 0),
(5013, 2507, 'us', 'Into the Deep', '2013-08-06', 0),
(5015, 2508, 'us', 'The Mirror Has Three Faces', '2013-08-13', 0);
Attention!
This is the original table data with "EPISODE_ID" not "SERIES_ID".
The data I want are those with closest dates to today, which are here 4944 and 5015.

Answer 1

If you want the last aired date for each country, then use this aggregation:
SELECT country, max(date) as lastdate
FROM `episode_data` ed
WHERE `ed`.`date` < CURDATE( ) AND
`ed`.`date` != '1970-01-01' AND
`ed`.`series_id` = 1
GROUP BY `ed`.`country`;
If you are trying to get the episode_id and title as well, you can use group_concat() and substring_index():
SELECT country, max(date) as lastdate,
substring_index(group_concat(episode_id order by date desc), ',', 1
) as episode_id,
substring_index(group_concat(title order by date desc separator '|'), '|', 1
) as title
FROM `episode_data` ed
WHERE `ed`.`date` < CURDATE( ) AND
`ed`.`date` != '1970-01-01' AND
`ed`.`series_id` = 1
GROUP BY `ed`.`country`;
Note that this uses a different separator for the title, under the assumption that it might have a comma.