TV Series · 2003 · TV Series · 2000s
Carnivàle
Scored from 96 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: TV Series · 2000s (1,360 peers).
Summary
Daniel Knauf's HBO series opens in the Dust Bowl of 1934, when Ben Hawkins (Nick Stahl), an Oklahoma fugitive who can heal the sick by drawing life out of something nearby, is taken in by a struggling travelling carnival run by the dwarf Samson (Michael J. Anderson) on behalf of an unseen figure called Management. In California, a Methodist minister, Brother Justin Crowe (Clancy Brown), discovers he can force people to confront their own sins, and builds a following while his sister Iris (Amy Madigan) clears his path. Visions and dreams push the two men toward a meeting neither understands, part of a hidden war between light and dark carried down through generations. It is a period supernatural drama, ended after two seasons.
Released in 2003, Carnivàle is a drama, fantasy and mystery television series. Its certificate is TV-MA. Episodes run about 1h. Its country of origin is listed as the United States.
Only 96 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 100 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 1,359 2000s television series, not against the whole corpus.
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 Carnivàle 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 · 2000s (1,360 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 96.
Cohort: TV Series · 2000s
