TV Series · 2004 · TV Series · 2000s
The Staircase
Scored from 179 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: TV Series · 2000s (1,360 peers).
Summary
This French documentary series follows the trial of American novelist Michael Peterson, who was accused of murdering his wife Kathleen after she was found dead at the bottom of a staircase in their North Carolina home in 2001. With unprecedented access to the defense team, the series chronicles the investigation, courtroom proceedings, and the toll the case takes on Peterson's family.
The Staircase (2004) is a television series IMDb files under the crime, documentary and drama genres.
179 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 186 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track. The cohort it is ranked inside is 2000s television series — 1,360 of them.
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 Staircase 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 179.
Cohort: TV Series · 2000s
