The True Top 25, Week Ending 1/8/12 (2011-12 Week 16)

NBC's Sunday Night Football may be over, but NBC and the NFL teamed up for one last victory in the True Top 25, this time on Saturday night. The Lions/Saints Wild Card matchup outrated any of NBC's Sunday night games this season.

Other than that, it was a relatively slow week. ABC was mostly all new, and most of those programs were up from their previous original, but TRUE mostly wasn't too impressed because of the general combination of high viewing and little competition. With no The Big Bang Theory this week, the top scripted honors went rather comfortably to Modern Family, and NCIS and the big return of Grey's Anatomy actually outdid the entire soft-returning CBS Monday lineup. 2 Broke Girls once again outdid Two and a Half Men in TRUE, and it's pretty close to making the pass in raw 18-49 ratings now.

Rank	Name	TRUE	A18-49	ARank
1	Sports: NFL Playoffs	12.49	11.3	1
2	Modern Family	5.44	5.7	2
3	Grey's Anatomy	4.22	4.5	4
4	NCIS	4.05	4.1	7
5	2 Broke Girls	4.03	4.4	6
6	Two and a Half Men	3.70	4.5	4
7	The Big Bang Theory (R)	3.65	3.5	11
8	Mike and Molly	3.29	3.8	9
9	The Middle	2.94	3.0	15
10	How I Met Your Mother	2.92	3.9	8
11	Once Upon a Time	2.81	3.7	10
12	NCIS: Los Angeles	2.79	3.5	11
13	Sports: The Cotton Bowl	2.79	2.5	24
14	Hawaii Five-0	2.71	2.9	17
15	Winter Wipeout	2.60	2.7	19
16	Unforgettable	2.59	2.6	22
17	Revenge	2.56	2.5	24
18	Suburgatory	2.45	2.9	17
19	CSI: Miami	2.34	2.6	22
20	Family Guy	2.34	3.1	14
21	Celebrity Wife Swap	2.28	2.3	31
22	Private Practice	2.28	2.7	19
23	Fear Factor	2.26	2.4	27
24	Last Man Standing	2.23	2.4	27
25	Blue Bloods	2.23	1.8	40

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: Desperate Housewives (t-#15 in A18-49, #27 in TRUE), Rules of Engagement (R) (t-#24 in A18-49, #28 in TRUE), Happy Endings (#13 in A18-49, #33 in TRUE), The Good Wife (t-#19 in A18-49, #36 in TRUE) and a hugely football-fueled 60 Minutes (#3 in A18-49, #50 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!