TV Series · 2021 · TV Series · 2020s
Cruel Summer
Scored from 202 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: TV Series · 2020s (3,070 peers).
Summary
Set in a small Texas town across three summers (1993, 1994, 1995), the series follows two teenage girls whose lives become intertwined after one, the popular Kate Wallis, disappears and the other, awkward outsider Jeanette Turner, is accused of knowing more than she let on. Told from shifting perspectives, it unravels what really happened during those pivotal summers.
Cruel Summer (2021) is a television series IMDb files under the drama, mystery and thriller genres.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 49 of whom clear the calibration test. 3,069 other television series from the 2020s form the cohort it is ranked inside. The calibrated figure is built from 202 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 212 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead.
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 Cruel Summer 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 · 2020s (3,070 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 202.
Cohort: TV Series · 2020s
