Yes Minister has an IQ Score of 163/200 on TV Intelligentsia's Intelligence Quotient rubric, placing it in the Masterclass tier.
Measurably increases domain knowledge or cognitive capacity
Score Breakdown
IQ = round((Cognitive × 0.4 + Educational × 0.35 + Craft × 0.25) × 4)
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The TVI Take
Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn's 1980-84 BBC sitcom about the relationship between newly-appointed Minister Jim Hacker (Paul Eddington) and his career-civil-servant Permanent Secretary Sir Humphrey Appleby (Nigel Hawthorne). The structural commitment to letting Whitehall-bureaucratic-cognition be the show's actual subject, institutional capture, civil-service-vs-elected-official tension, the architecture of policy generation, was so accurate Margaret Thatcher cited it as documentary.
Required viewing for understanding parliamentary democracy.
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