TV Series · 1993 · TV Series · 1990s
Babylon 5
Scored from 142 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: TV Series · 1990s (630 peers).
Summary
J. Michael Straczynski's science-fiction series opens in 2258 aboard Babylon 5, a five-mile-long Earth Alliance station in neutral space, built after a catastrophic war with the Minbari as neutral ground for human and alien diplomacy. Commander Jeffrey Sinclair (Michael O'Hare) runs it with Susan Ivanova (Claudia Christian) and security chief Michael Garibaldi (Jerry Doyle), among resident ambassadors including the Minbari Delenn (Mira Furlan) and the Centauri and Narn antagonists Londo Mollari (Peter Jurasik) and G'Kar (Andreas Katsulas). Captain John Sheridan (Bruce Boxleitner) takes command in the second season, as an ancient power stirs beyond charted space and politics on Earth harden. Straczynski plotted the whole thing as a single five-season novel for television.
Released in 1993, Babylon 5 is an action, adventure and drama television series. A typical episode runs 44 minutes. It was made in the United States.
142 IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, and those are the ones the calibrated score reads; a separate, broader pool of 154 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track. A second review pool sits behind it as well: 69 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. 629 other television series from the 1990s form the cohort it is ranked inside.
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 Babylon 5 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 Series · 1990s (630 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 142.
Cohort: TV Series · 1990s
