Film · 1994 · Films · 1990s
Quiz Show
Scored from 148 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
By 1958 NBC's Twenty-One is one of America's most watched programmes, and its producers decide that the reigning champion, the abrasive and unglamorous Herb Stempel of Queens, has exhausted his appeal. They install Charles Van Doren, a Columbia English instructor from a celebrated literary family, whose telegenic agonising in the isolation booth turns him into a national figure. Discarded and with promises to him unkept, Stempel starts telling anyone who will listen that the contest is rigged. Richard Goodwin, a young congressional investigator, takes up the story and finds that the network, the sponsor and the contestants themselves all have reasons to keep it buried. Robert Redford's drama draws on Goodwin's memoir of the 1950s quiz-show scandals.
Quiz Show (1994) is a film IMDb files under the biography, drama and history genres. Its certificate is PG-13. It runs 2h 13m. Its country of origin is listed as the United States.
The calibrated figure is built from 148 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 150 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 1,011 of whom clear the calibration test. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 4,081 1990s films, 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 Quiz Show 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 Films · 1990s (4,082 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 148.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
