TV Mini Series · 2006 · TV Mini Series · 2000s
When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts
Scored from 35 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: TV Mini Series · 2000s (259 peers).
Summary
Spike Lee's four-act documentary covers Hurricane Katrina's landfall in August 2005, the collapse of the levee system, and the flooding and abandonment of New Orleans. It is built from interviews with residents, historians, journalists and officials — among them trumpeter Terence Blanchard, who wrote the score and is filmed walking his mother through her ruined home. The acts move from the storm and the Superdome through the failures of FEMA and local government to the scattering of displaced residents. Lee also gives room to residents' suspicion that the levees were breached on purpose, a fear rooted in the 1927 dynamiting of a levee downriver; HBO aired the film on the storm's first anniversary.
When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts is a 2006 documentary miniseries. It was made in the United States. It is rated TV-14. A typical episode runs 240 minutes.
The cohort it is ranked inside is 2000s miniseries — 259 of them. Only 35 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 40 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 When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts 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 35.
Cohort: TV Mini Series · 2000s
