The True Top 25, Week Ending 11/20/11 (2011-12 Week Nine)

For the first time in four weeks, there's a scripted show on top of the True Top 25, and it's the same one that's been dominating this metric (among scripted shows) for many weeks now. This is the last mostly "normal" week of 2011, so enjoy seeing what has settled down as a mostly predictable hierarchy for one last time.

As I said, most of this is fairly predictable now, but one thing that seems noteworthy in the last few weeks is the rise of some of the ":30" sitcoms; Happy Endings used to not be able to make this list at all, and Mike and Molly hit another best-ever TRUE this week. Rules of Engagement has also been stronger in recent weeks than any other time in the last couple years. Perhaps the extended exposure with huge lead-ins is actually helping those shows in meaningful ways.

Rank	Name	TRUE	A18-49	ARank
1	The Big Bang Theory	6.71	5.3	4
2	Sunday Night Football	6.63	7.6	1
3	Modern Family	6.10	5.6	2
4	Two and a Half Men	5.42	5.4	3
5	How I Met Your Mother	4.84	4.6	6
6	NCIS	4.44	4.0	9
7	2 Broke Girls	4.40	4.8	5
8	The X Factor Wed	4.31	3.9	10
9	Survivor	3.95	3.3	16
10	American Music Awards	3.89	4.3	8
11	Mike and Molly	3.89	4.4	7
12	Criminal Minds	3.81	3.7	11
13	The Middle	3.58	3.0	22
14	New Girl	3.42	3.5	13
15	The X Factor Thu	3.42	3.1	21
16	Saturday Night Football	3.37	3.4	14
17	Glee	3.24	3.0	22
18	Dancing with the Stars Mon	3.19	3.2	18
19	Suburgatory	3.11	2.9	24
20	Rules of Engagement	3.11	3.6	12
21	Hawaii Five-0	3.11	3.3	16
22	NCIS: Los Angeles	2.93	3.4	14
23	Last Man Standing	2.84	2.6	31
24	Happy Endings	2.80	3.2	18
25	The Office	2.80	2.9	24

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: Family Guy (t-#18 in A18-49, #26 in TRUE) and football-fueled 60 Minutes (t-#24 in A18-49, #66 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. 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!