TV Mini Series · 2025 · TV Mini Series · 2020s
Death by Lightning
Scored from 121 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: TV Mini Series · 2020s (1,094 peers).
Summary
A Netflix limited series dramatizing the unlikely intersecting lives of James A. Garfield, the reluctant dark-horse candidate who became the 20th U.S. President, and Charles Guiteau, the delusional office-seeker who stalked and ultimately shot him in 1881. Based on Candice Millard's book Destiny of the Republic, it traces Garfield's rise, Guiteau's spiral, and the political corruption surrounding the assassination.
Death by Lightning (2025) is a miniseries IMDb files under the biography, drama and history genres.
Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 1,093 2020s miniseries, not against the whole corpus. The calibrated figure is built from 121 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 145 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 68 of whom clear the calibration test.
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 Death by Lightning 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 Mini Series · 2020s (1,094 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 121.
Cohort: TV Mini Series · 2020s
