TV Series · 2025 · TV Series · 2020s
When Life Gives You Tangerines
Scored from 208 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: TV Series · 2020s (3,070 peers).
Summary
A Korean series tracing the lives of Oh Ae-sun and Yang Gwan-sik on Jeju Island from the 1950s to the present day. Ae-sun (IU) is the sharp-tongued daughter of a haenyeo diver, determined to become a poet in a village with no use for a girl's ambitions; Gwan-sik (Park Bo-gum) is the quiet neighbour who decided early and permanently that he would look after her. Their marriage, children, farm and fishing work, and the pressures of poverty and rural custom carry the story into later decades, where Moon So-ri and Park Hae-joon take over the roles and IU returns as their grown daughter, Geum-myeong. Written by Lim Sang-choon and directed by Kim Won-seok, its sixteen episodes are grouped into four parts named for the seasons.
Released in 2025, When Life Gives You Tangerines is a drama, history and romance television series. It plays in Korean. Its country of origin is listed as South Korea.
Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 3,069 2020s television series, not against the whole corpus. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 14 of whom clear the calibration test. The calibrated figure is built from 208 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 257 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead.
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 When Life Gives You Tangerines 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 · 2020s (3,070 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 208.
Cohort: TV Series · 2020s
