TV Series · 1966 · TV Series · 1960s
Dark Shadows
Scored from 27 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: TV Series · 1960s (154 peers).
Summary
Victoria Winters, an orphan who knows nothing of her own parentage, takes a governess job at Collinwood, the Collins estate above the Maine fishing town of Collinsport, where the reclusive Elizabeth Collins Stoddard presides over a household full of withheld history. Dan Curtis's ABC daytime serial began in 1966 as a gothic mystery and turned supernatural in 1967, when a handyman opened a chained coffin and released Barnabas Collins, a vampire shut in since the eighteenth century who passes himself off as a cousin from England. Across 1,225 episodes it added a witch, a werewolf, séances and long flashbacks to 1795 and 1897 in which the cast played their characters' ancestors. Taped almost live, it left flubbed lines in.
Dark Shadows is a 1966 drama, fantasy and horror television series. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. Episodes run about 30m.
Only 27 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 29 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 6 of whom clear the calibration test. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 153 1960s 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 Dark Shadows 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 · 1960s (154 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 27.
Cohort: TV Series · 1960s
