TV Series · 2011 · TV Series · 2010s
Hell on Wheels
Scored from 143 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: TV Series · 2010s (3,236 peers).
Summary
Cullen Bohannon, a former Confederate soldier from Mississippi, is hunting the Union troopers who murdered his wife and son, and the trail leads him to the Union Pacific's westward push across the plains in 1865. He signs on as a cut boss in Hell on Wheels, the itinerant tent city of laborers, freedmen, Irish immigrants, gamblers and merchants that moves with the railhead under the ruthless financier Thomas 'Doc' Durant. His uneasy alliance with Elam Ferguson, a freed slave working the grade, and his collisions with Durant, the Army and the Cheyenne keep pulling him away from his revenge. The AMC period western ran five seasons as the line pushed west.
Released in 2011, Hell on Wheels is a drama and western television series. Its certificate is TV-MA. Episodes run about 44m. Its country of origin is listed as the United States.
3,235 other television series from the 2010s form the cohort it is ranked inside. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 64 of whom clear the calibration test. The calibrated figure is built from 143 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 153 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 Hell on Wheels 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 143.
Cohort: TV Series · 2010s
