TV Mini Series · 1978 · TV Mini Series · 1970s
Centennial
Scored from 40 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: TV Mini Series · 1970s (31 peers).
Summary
Adapted from James A. Michener's novel, this twelve-part NBC miniseries traces two centuries around the fictional town of Centennial, Colorado, on the South Platte River, moving from the fur trade of the 1790s to the land and water politics of the 1970s. It opens with the French-Canadian trapper Pasquinel (Robert Conrad), his Scottish partner Alexander McKeag (Richard Chamberlain) and the Arapaho woman Clay Basket, whose descendants and rivals carry the story through buffalo hunting, cattle drives, homesteading, irrigation and agribusiness. A present-day inquiry into the region's history frames the episodes, each built around a different generation. The conflict is cumulative: each wave of arrivals takes the land from the one before it.
Centennial is a 1978 action, adventure and drama miniseries. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. Its certificate is PG. Episodes run about 2h.
30 other miniseries from the 1970s form the cohort it is ranked inside. Only 40 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 47 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track.
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 Centennial 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 Mini Series · 1970s (31 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 40.
Cohort: TV Mini Series · 1970s
