TV Series · 1969 · TV Series · 1960s
Monty Python's Flying Circus
Scored from 48 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: TV Series · 1960s (154 peers).
Summary
The BBC sketch series written and performed by Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin, first broadcast in October 1969 and running to 45 episodes across four series. It abandons the conventional sketch format: pieces run into one another without punchlines, get interrupted by a stern announcer at a desk in unlikely locations, and are stitched together by Gilliam's cut-out animations. Its targets are British institutions and habits — the civil service, the BBC itself, the class system, philosophy, the military — played by the six of them in multiple roles, with Carol Cleveland the principal recurring female performer. Cleese left before the fourth series, which aired as simply Monty Python.
Released in 1969, Monty Python's Flying Circus is a comedy television series. A typical episode runs 30 minutes. It was made in the United Kingdom.
153 other television series from the 1960s form the cohort it is ranked inside. A second review pool sits behind it as well: 10 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. Only 48 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 48 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 Monty Python's Flying Circus 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 · 1960s (154 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 48.
Cohort: TV Series · 1960s
