The True Top 25, Week Ending 10/23/11 (2011-12 Week Five)

The Big Bang Theory takes home the TRUE crown for the second straight week, and its gap over second-place Modern Family grew a little bit. No surprise, since the show was up by 0.5 week-to-week in 18-49, but it was only up by about 0.17 in TRUE. It may not have been up at all if not for a really low PUT calculation at 8:00 (an estimated 31.1% of A18-49 were watching TV Thursday at 8:00, the lowest number for any half-hour of any weeknight this season to date).

As projected last week, the World Series has a definite presence on this list, though the Series has gotten Truly weaker with each of the first four games (a streak that'll be snapped with Game 5). I'm not sure Game 6 could win the TRUE crown next week, but I'm almost positive a Game 7 would (be it on Thursday or Friday). Also look for a stronger showing from Sunday Night Football next week with ratings magnets the Eagles and Cowboys dueling. As I said last week, in terms of maintaining the True Strength metric, I'll be glad when baseball is over. But as a ratings enthusiast, I'd be really interested to see what a Game 7 could do!

Rank	Name	TRUE	A18-49	ARank
1	The Big Bang Theory	6.18	5.1	4
2	Modern Family	5.63	5.7	1
3	Two and a Half Men	4.95	5.3	2
4	How I Met Your Mother	4.78	4.2	6
5	2 Broke Girls	4.06	4.4	5
6	NCIS	4.05	3.9	11
7	Sports: Sunday Night Football	4.04	5.2	3
8	Sports: World Series (Game 1, Wed)	3.72	4.2	6
9	X Factor Wed (special on Tue)	3.64	3.9	11
10	Last Man Standing	3.45	3.1	21
11	Grey's Anatomy	3.40	3.6	15
12	Criminal Minds	3.38	3.9	11
13	Once Upon a Time	3.36	4.0	9
14	Survivor	3.32	3.3	18
15	Sports: World Series (Game 2, Thu)	3.26	4.0	9
16	Dancing with the Stars Mon	3.22	3.3	18
17	The Middle	3.17	3.0	25
18	Sports: World Series (Game 3, Sat)	3.15	3.2	20
19	Mike and Molly	2.98	3.9	11
20	Terra Nova	2.88	2.8	28
21	Hawaii Five-0	2.85	3.1	21
22	Sports: World Series (Game 4, Sun)	2.83	4.2	6
23	Rules of Engagement	2.83	3.6	15
24	House	2.71	3.1	21
25	Suburgatory	2.68	3.1	21

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: NCIS: Los Angeles (#17 in A18-49, #26 in TRUE), Happy Endings (t-#25 in A18-49, #42 in TRUE) and Desperate Housewives (t-#25 in A18-49, #43 in TRUE).

I created the True Strength number last summer so I could have an objective way of comparing shows across vastly different situations. One of the most fun comparisons to be made is among the biggest shows on TV. What's really the strongest show in a vacuum? Hence my new weekly feature the True Top 25. This will compare shows while accounting for everything so we can see who Truly comes out on top. I include both the A18-49 and the weekly ranking in A18-49 so you can see the changes within the rankings that True Strength makes.

The A18-49 rankings aren't based on Nielsen's "official" broadcast top 25. They're derived from my own spreadsheet just using the big-five networks, so none of the big players on Univision are included. I've also weeded out some weird programming like NFL overruns and sports pre-game shows. Most of that stuff airs largely out of primetime or is strangely split apart, so I don't want to muddle the list with that.

As mentioned on the sports SpotVault pages, True Strengths for sporting events are based on the primetime portion only. This is especially important this week with all the World Series games. Perhaps in future editions I'll try to get the primetime portion only A18-49 into the A18-49 rankings so it'll be a totally fair comparison. 

Here's last week's True Top 25!