Is Taboo actually good?

Taboo sits in the 88.6% percentile against all 52,376 ranked seriess, meaning it scores above 88.6% of them. That figure is a rank, not a star average: each reviewer's score is re-centred on their own rating history before anything is compared, so a generous grader and a harsh one count the same.

How does Taboo compare to similar seriess?

Within TV Series · 2010s, Taboo lands in the 85.7% percentile. The cohort comparison exists because a global rank flatters or punishes a series for its category rather than its quality.

How many reviewers is Taboo's score based on?

233 reviewers cleared the calibration test for Taboo — meaning their rating history varies enough to place a personal baseline. Reviewers who rate everything the same carry no information and are excluded rather than averaged in.

How is the Taboo score calculated?

Every review is scored relative to the reviewer's own average rather than taken at face value, then each calibrated reviewer is weighted equally and the result is expressed as a percentile against the full corpus. The output is a rank among peers, which is why it is published as a percentile and never as a star rating.

2017

global pct

88.6

TV Series · 2017 · TV Series · 2010s

Taboo

Name: Taboo
Genre: Drama, Mystery, Thriller
Released: 2017
Duration: 1 h

Scored from 233 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: TV Series · 2010s (3,236 peers).

88.6%

Global percentile

vs. all 52,376 ranked titles

85.7%

In-cohort percentile

TV Series · 2010s · 3,236 titles

98.5%

AI-adjusted percentile

233 calibrated reviewers, thin samples pulled to the mean

Summary

Steven Knight's period drama opens in London in 1814, as James Keziah Delaney (Tom Hardy) returns from twelve years in Africa, long presumed dead, to attend his father's funeral. His inheritance is a strip of land at Nootka Sound on the Pacific coast of North America: worthless-looking, but a strategic prize for both the East India Company and the United States, then at war with Britain. Delaney refuses every offer for it and sets about building his own trading venture, while the Company's Sir Stuart Strange (Jonathan Pryce), agents of the Crown and members of his own family, including his half-sister Zilpha (Oona Chaplin), manoeuvre to take it from him. The eight-episode series moves between the riverside docks, the Company boardroom and the violent past Delaney brought home with him.

Taboo is a 2017 drama, mystery and thriller television series. It is rated TV-MA. A typical episode runs 60 minutes. It was made in the United Kingdom.

3,235 other television series from the 2010s form the cohort it is ranked inside. A second review pool sits behind it as well: 99 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. 233 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 250 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 Taboo 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 233.