TV Series · 2014 · TV Series · 2010s
Fargo
Scored from 737 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: TV Series · 2010s (3,236 peers).
Summary
Noah Hawley's FX anthology crime series extends the world of the Coen brothers' 1996 film, opening in 2006 Bemidji, Minnesota, where browbeaten insurance salesman Lester Nygaard meets Lorne Malvo, a drifting hitman who offers to solve his problems. The killings that follow draw in Deputy Molly Solverson, who pursues the case against her chief's skepticism. Later seasons tell self-contained stories in other times and places — a 1979 war between Fargo's Gerhardt crime family and a Kansas City syndicate, a 1950 Kansas City turf pact, a 2019 Minnesota abduction — with new casts and occasional overlaps. Each opens with the same mock assurance that what follows is a true story.
Fargo is a 2014 crime, drama and thriller television series starring Martin Freeman, Billy Bob Thornton and Allison Tolman. Episodes run about 48m. Its certificate is TV-MA. Noah Hawley created it. Its country of origin is listed as the United States.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 788 of whom clear the calibration test. The cohort it is ranked inside is 2010s television series — 3,236 of them. The calibrated figure is built from 737 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 767 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 Fargo 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 737.
Cohort: TV Series · 2010s
