TV Mini Series · 1976 · TV Mini Series · 1970s
Rich Man, Poor Man
Scored from 29 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 Irwin Shaw's novel for ABC, this twelve-part miniseries follows the Jordache brothers from the end of the Second World War into the 1960s. Rudy (Peter Strauss) is the disciplined, ambitious son, who works his way up from a department store into business and local politics; Tom (Nick Nolte) is the volatile one, driven out of the family home in Port Philip, New York, and drifting through prizefighting and the merchant marine. Their embittered German immigrant father Axel and Julie Prescott, the girl Rudy loves and loses, set the terms of a rivalry that keeps the brothers apart for years. It was one of the first American network dramas to spread a single story across an entire season.
Released in 1976, Rich Man, Poor Man is a drama miniseries. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. Its certificate is TV-PG.
Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 30 1970s miniseries, not against the whole corpus. Only 29 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 33 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 Rich Man, Poor Man 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 29.
Cohort: TV Mini Series · 1970s
