TV Series · 2016 · TV Series · 2010s
Designated Survivor
Scored from 866 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: TV Series · 2010s (3,236 peers).
Summary
When a terrorist attack on the Capitol during the State of the Union kills the President and most of Congress, Tom Kirkman, a low-ranking Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, is suddenly thrust into the presidency. He must navigate political intrigue, national security threats, and a government fractured by the attack while unraveling the conspiracy behind the bombing.
Designated Survivor is a 2016 drama, political thriller and crime television series starring Kiefer Sutherland, Adan Canto and Maggie Q. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. Episodes run about 45m. Its certificate is TV-14. David Guggenheim created it.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 162 of whom clear the calibration test. The calibrated figure is built from 866 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 914 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 3,235 2010s 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 Designated Survivor 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 866.
Cohort: TV Series · 2010s
