Is it the code you are calling complex, or the resulting datastructure? What exactly is the final datastructure you are looking for?

Do you want to take your show / char hash combos two at a time, or is one at a time okay? (In which case you get an array of eight hashes.) If an array of eight hashes is what you want, try dumping $AoH_show_characters after the second chunk of code.

Otherwise, if you want four arrays of two hashes each, like my code produces, I can't see any way to get the job done without this kind of maybe slightly confusing nesting.

Good luck!