TV Series · 2000 · TV Series · 2000s
Black Books
Scored from 51 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: TV Series · 2000s (1,360 peers).
Summary
Bernard Black owns a cramped second-hand bookshop in London and treats customers, daylight and paperwork as intrusions on his drinking. In the first episode he takes on Manny Bianco, a gentle former accountant, as an assistant, and the pair spend the series in the company of Fran Katzenjammer, who runs the shop next door and matches Bernard's wine intake. Episodes turn on tax returns, book-club evenings, unwanted friends, landlords and elaborate schemes to avoid work, and rarely leave the shop or the flat above it. Dylan Moran and Graham Linehan created the Channel 4 sitcom, which ran for three series of six episodes between 2000 and 2004.
Released in 2000, Black Books is a comedy television series. Episodes run about 28m. Its certificate is 15. Its country of origin is listed as the United Kingdom.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 6 of whom clear the calibration test. Only 51 of its IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, so the calibrated figure rests on a thin sample; a broader pool of 53 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. 1,359 other television series from the 2000s form the cohort it is ranked inside.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where Black Books lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against TV Series · 2000s (1,360 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 51.
Cohort: TV Series · 2000s
