TV Mini Series · 1979 · TV Mini Series · 1970s
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Scored from 73 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: TV Mini Series · 1970s (31 peers).
Summary
The BBC's seven-part adaptation of John le Carré's novel stars Alec Guinness as George Smiley, a quiet, unglamorous intelligence officer forced out of the Circus — Britain's Secret Intelligence Service — after an operation in Czechoslovakia ended in disaster. Recalled privately by a Whitehall official to investigate what the service will not admit publicly, Smiley must establish that one of the four men now running it is a long-term Soviet agent run by his Moscow Centre counterpart Karla, and work out which. Old files, pensioned-off colleagues such as the researcher Connie Sachs, his assistant Peter Guillam and the field man Ricki Tarr supply the fragments, while the suspects carry the nursery-rhyme codenames of the title. Directed by John Irvin, it is a procedural built on interviews, memory and paperwork rather than action.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979) is a miniseries IMDb files under the drama, mystery and thriller genres. It was made in the United Kingdom. A typical episode runs 50 minutes.
A second review pool sits behind it as well: 3 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. The cohort it is ranked inside is 1970s miniseries — 31 of them. Only 73 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 77 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 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy 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 73.
Cohort: TV Mini Series · 1970s
