TV Series · 2017 · TV Series · 2010s
Cardinal
Scored from 119 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: TV Series · 2010s (3,236 peers).
Summary
Set in the fictional northern Ontario town of Algonquin Bay, this Canadian crime drama follows Detective John Cardinal as he investigates disturbing cases while haunted by a previous unsolved murder that damaged his reputation. Partnered with Lise Delorme, who is secretly investigating him for internal affairs, Cardinal must navigate personal struggles, including his wife's mental illness, while pursuing dangerous killers across the frozen landscape.
Cardinal is a 2017 crime, drama and mystery television series.
The calibrated figure is built from 119 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 125 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 24 of whom clear the calibration test. 3,235 other television series from the 2010s 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 Cardinal 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 · 2010s (3,236 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 119.
Cohort: TV Series · 2010s
