TV Mini Series · 2002 · TV Mini Series · 2000s
Tipping the Velvet
Scored from 34 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: TV Mini Series · 2000s (259 peers).
Summary
Nancy Astley, an oyster girl working in her family's Whitstable restaurant in the 1890s, is transfixed by Kitty Butler, a male impersonator playing the local music hall, and follows her to London as her dresser and then her partner in a stage double act. What they are to each other cannot be admitted on stage or off, and when the arrangement collapses Nan is thrown into a run of other lives in the city, walking the streets in men's clothes and later kept as the pet of the rich widow Diana Lethaby. Andrew Davies adapted Sarah Waters's novel into this three-part BBC serial, with Rachael Stirling as Nan, Keeley Hawes as Kitty and Anna Chancellor as Diana. It is a picaresque period drama about a lesbian coming of age across the class layers of late-Victorian London.
Tipping the Velvet (2002) is a miniseries IMDb files under the drama and romance genres. Its country of origin is listed as the United Kingdom. Episodes run about 3h.
The cohort it is ranked inside is 2000s miniseries — 259 of them. Only 34 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 38 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 281 of whom clear the calibration test.
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 Tipping the Velvet 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 · 2000s (259 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 34.
Cohort: TV Mini Series · 2000s
