TV Series · 2008 · TV Series · 2000s
Merlin
Scored from 290 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: TV Series · 2000s (1,360 peers).
Summary
In the mythical kingdom of Camelot, a young Merlin arrives to begin work as a servant and discovers he possesses extraordinary magical powers - powers he must hide, since King Uther has outlawed sorcery on pain of death. Guided by the court physician Gaius and a mysterious Great Dragon, Merlin secretly uses his gifts to protect the arrogant Prince Arthur, with whom he forges an unlikely friendship destined to shape the kingdom's future.
Released in 2008, Merlin is an adventure, drama and fantasy television series.
The cohort it is ranked inside is 2000s television series — 1,360 of them. 290 IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, and those are the ones the calibrated score reads; a separate, broader pool of 325 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track.
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 Merlin 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 · 2000s (1,360 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 290.
Cohort: TV Series · 2000s
