TV Series · 1957 · TV Series · 1950s
Perry Mason
Scored from 67 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: TV Series · 1950s (36 peers).
Summary
This CBS legal drama, adapted from Erle Stanley Gardner's novels, stars Raymond Burr as Perry Mason, a Los Angeles defense attorney whose clients are charged with murder. Each self-contained episode follows Mason, his secretary Della Street and the private investigator Paul Drake as they work a case being prosecuted by district attorney Hamilton Burger and built by Lieutenant Arthur Tragg of homicide, usually against heavy circumstantial evidence. The pattern turns on a courtroom hearing in which Mason's cross-examination draws the truth out of someone other than his client. The series ran nine seasons and 271 episodes between 1957 and 1966.
Perry Mason is a 1957 crime, drama and mystery television series. A typical episode runs 60 minutes. It was made in the United States.
Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 35 1950s television series, not against the whole corpus. Only 67 of its IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, so the calibrated figure rests on a thin sample; a broader pool of 69 reviewers with at least two reviews 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 Perry Mason 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 · 1950s (36 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 67.
Cohort: TV Series · 1950s
