The True Top 25, Week Ending 10/9/11 (2011-12 Week Three)

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.

After two weeks of Two and a Half Men domination, the show Truly dropped sharply in week three, falling behind not only new champ Sunday Night Football (fueled by a big Packers/Falcons matchup) but also the still tightly-packed duo of Modern Family and Big Bang Theory. Men was damaged not only by its own drop but also by a big competition drop (with an extremely weak Monday Night Football game last week). For a third straight week, Modern Family just barely eked ahead of the vastly undervalued Big Bang. The only two shows on the list that weren't here last week: House (which premiered in this week) and Up All Night.

Rank	Name	TRUE	A18-49	ARank
1	Sports: Sunday Night Football	7.55	8.9	1
2	Modern Family	6.01	5.7	3
3	The Big Bang Theory	5.92	4.5	4
4	Two and a Half Men	5.53	6.2	2
5	NCIS	4.56	4.2	9
6	X Factor Wed	4.49	4.1	10
7	How I Met Your Mother	4.43	4.5	4
8	2 Broke Girls	4.30	4.5	4
9	X Factor Thu	4.21	4.0	11
10	New Girl	3.98	4.3	7
11	Glee	3.85	3.6	14
12	Survivor	3.61	3.1	19
13	House	3.42	3.9	12
14	Criminal Minds	3.42	3.8	13
15	The Middle	3.31	2.8	27
16	The Office	3.31	3.2	16
17	Suburgatory	3.25	3.1	19
18	Grey's Anatomy	3.25	3.1	19
19	Mike and Molly	3.25	4.3	7
20	Terra Nova	3.07	3.1	19
21	Dancing with the Stars Mon	2.80	3.1	19
22	Hawaii Five-0	2.79	3.2	16
23	NCIS: Los Angeles	2.78	3.4	15
24	CSI	2.70	2.9	24
25	Up All Night	2.66	2.3	37

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: The Tuesday Dancing with the Stars (t-#24 in A18-49, #26 in TRUE) and football-fueled 60 Minutes (t-#16 in A18-49, #50 in TRUE).

Another important note: 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. 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!