The True Top 25, Week Ending 10/30/11 (2011-12 Week Six)

My projection last week was that the World Series might win the week if it went six games and probably would if it went seven. Well, I was wrong, as Sunday Night Football turned in a fairly massive week and was ahead of the Series by nearly a half-point in TRUE. Though I'd note that the Series may have won if I were able to better encapsulate the full telecast; this TRUE just catches 8:00 to 10:00, and the game likely got Truly stronger as it progressed. (It certainly did in raw numbers!) Game 6 was fairly close to usual contenders Big Bang and Two and a Half Men but would've lost out to them had the series ended on Thursday night.

The Big Bang Theory was the top scripted program for the third straight week, though it seems to be yet another program "hurt" in this particular metric by having to face a big baseball game; its 5.28 was pretty easily its lowest of the season. Other shows I'd argue took bigger hits than they "should" have on Thursday include Grey's Anatomy and The Office. So that's something more to look at! Going forward, though... baseball is over. So hopefully some order will be restored.

I'll make some more of ABC's Wednesday a little later this week, but it was some crazy stuff; Modern Family made the top 10 in repeat mode, Suburgatory was up a lot from its last couple weeks, and the biggest mover was Happy Endings, a perennial raw-18-49 top 25er that finally makes the TRUE list.

Rank	Name	TRUE	A18-49	ARank
1	Sports: Sunday Night Football	7.91	9.3	1
2	Sports: World Series (Game 7, Fri)	7.45	7.4	2
3	The Big Bang Theory	5.28	4.6	5
4	Two and a Half Men	5.00	5.5	4
5	Sports: World Series (Game 6, Thu)	4.87	6.5	3
6	NCIS	4.29	4.1	12
7	2 Broke Girls	4.29	4.5	6
8	X Factor Wed (special on Tue)	4.19	4.4	8
9	How I Met Your Mother	4.16	4.3	9
10	Modern Family (R)	3.93	4.5	6
11	Survivor	3.55	3.5	18
12	The Simpsons	3.52	4.0	14
13	Once Upon a Time	3.52	3.9	15
14	Grey's Anatomy	3.34	3.7	16
15	The Middle	3.32	3.2	22
16	NCIS: Los Angeles	3.24	3.7	16
17	Sports: World Series (Game 5, Mon)	3.24	4.2	10
18	Mike and Molly	3.22	4.2	10
19	Last Man Standing	3.20	2.8	29
20	Suburgatory	3.17	3.4	20
21	Dancing with the Stars Mon	2.95	3.2	22
22	Hawaii Five-0	2.86	3.1	25
23	Happy Endings	2.85	3.5	18
24	Rules of Engagement	2.84	3.3	21
25	The Office	2.77	2.9	28

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: football-fueled 60 Minutes (t-#12 in A18-49, #34 in TRUE), Desperate Housewives (t-#25 in A18-49, #40 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!