TV Series · 1958 · TV Series · 1950s
The Rifleman
Scored from 37 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: TV Series · 1950s (36 peers).
Summary
Lucas McCain is a widowed Civil War veteran who buys a ranch outside North Fork, New Mexico Territory, in the 1880s and raises his young son Mark there alone. He wants only to work his land, but rustlers, land grabbers and hired guns keep arriving, and McCain's modified Winchester, which he can fire faster than most men can draw, makes him the town's reluctant defender alongside Marshal Micah Torrance. Each half-hour black-and-white episode turns a frontier dispute into a lesson McCain tries to pass on to Mark about killing, honesty and mercy. Chuck Connors and Johnny Crawford led the ABC Western, which ran five seasons from 1958 to 1963.
The Rifleman is a 1958 family and western television series. It was made in the United States. A typical episode runs 30 minutes. It is rated TV-G.
A second review pool sits behind it as well: 1 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. 35 other television series from the 1950s form the cohort it is ranked inside. Only 37 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 38 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 The Rifleman 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 37.
Cohort: TV Series · 1950s
