TV Mini Series · 2020 · TV Mini Series · 2020s
I Know This Much Is True
Scored from 173 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: TV Mini Series · 2020s (1,094 peers).
Summary
Mark Ruffalo plays both Birdsey twins in Derek Cianfrance's six-part adaptation of Wally Lamb's novel, set in the mill town of Three Rivers, Connecticut. In 1990, Thomas, who has lived with paranoid schizophrenia since college, commits a public act of self-mutilation in the town library in protest against the coming Gulf War and is committed to a maximum-security forensic hospital. His brother Dominick, a housepainter weighed down by his own losses and a lifetime of caretaking, fights to have him moved somewhere less punitive while a hospital psychologist presses him about the family's past. The HBO limited series cuts between 1990, the twins' childhood with a violent stepfather, and their Sicilian grandfather's memoir.
Released in 2020, I Know This Much Is True is a drama miniseries. Its certificate is TV-MA. Episodes run about 1h. Its country of origin is listed as the United States.
Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 1,093 2020s miniseries, not against the whole corpus. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 35 of whom clear the calibration test. The calibrated figure is built from 173 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 182 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead.
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 I Know This Much Is True 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 · 2020s (1,094 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 173.
Cohort: TV Mini Series · 2020s
