The True Top 25, Week Ending 12/25/11 (2011-12 Week 14)

It was another True Top 25 win for NBC's Sunday Night Football. The game was actually below the season average in raw A18-49 but was the third-biggest game of the year in TRUE because of how low the viewing levels were on Christmas Night. The only other original to break the 3.00 threshold was The X Factor for both halves of its two-night finale.

I may do a post further elaborating on this today or tomorrow, but Week 14 will most likely be the least-viewed week of the regular season. More than half of the top 25 was scripted repeats (and almost all of those were on CBS), while movies/specials on both Friday (Shrek the Halls) and Saturday (It's a Wonderful Life) made the list. The top 25 list will probably look more pathetic next week even if overall viewing goes up a bit.

There were just four broadcast scripted originals all week, and the biggest of those was the Terra Nova finale on Monday. The first half of the Terra Nova repeat on Saturday actually outdid the original, but that's because it had a national NFL telecast leading in which these numbers are unable to account for. (Even giving it a relatively conservative lead-in of 5.00, it would've dropped out of the top 25.)

Rank	Name	TRUE	A18-49	ARank
1	Sports: Sunday Night Football	8.61	7.7	1
2	The X Factor Thu	4.22	3.8	2
3	The X Factor Wed	3.81	3.3	3
4	The Big Bang Theory (R)	3.01	2.6	4
5	2 Broke Girls (R)	2.50	2.6	4
6	Modern Family (R)	2.45	2.2	8
7	Fear Factor	2.18	2.5	6
8	Terra Nova (R)	2.18	1.4	31
9	Movie: It's a Wonderful Life	2.15	1.5	23
10	Special: A Very Gilly Christmas	2.08	2.1	11
11	Rules of Engagement (R)	2.02	1.9	16
12	NCIS: Los Angeles (R)	1.95	2.1	11
13	Two and a Half Men (R)	1.90	2.3	7
14	Terra Nova	1.90	2.2	8
15	NCIS (R)	1.86	2.0	14
16	How I Met Your Mother (R)	1.82	2.1	11
17	Hawaii Five-0 (R)	1.79	1.8	18
18	Special: Shrek the Halls	1.78	1.5	23
19	Who's Still Standing? (Wed)	1.78	1.7	19
20	Who's Still Standing? (Tue)	1.75	1.9	16
21	Mike and Molly (R)	1.70	2.2	8
22	I Hate My Teenage Daughter	1.68	2.0	14
23	Unforgettable (R)	1.66	1.7	19
24	Criminal Minds (R)	1.65	1.5	23
25	CSI (R)	1.59	1.6	22

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: Person of Interest (R) (t-#19 in A18-49, #26 in TRUE), Who's Still Standing? (Thu) (t-#23 in A18-49, #27 in TRUE), Suburgatory (R) (t-#23 in A18-49, #28 in TRUE), Last Man Standing (R) (t-#23 in A18-49, #31 in TRUE), The Mentalist (R) (t-#23 in A18-49, #35 in TRUE) and Who's Still Standing? (Mon) (t-#23 in A18-49, #36 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!