The True Top 25, Week Ending 3/25/12 (2011-12 Week 27)

With the two biggest sitcoms off the air, it was all about unscripted, as American Idol rather comfortably captured the top two spots and The Voice (despite continued declines) still overshadowed everything else in the entertainment realm. Week two of March Madness had a nice presence, with Saturday's Ohio State/Syracuse game beating everything but Idol and the Friday game also near the top. Despite nearing a season low, How I Met Your Mother got a turn as the top scripted program as it aired in its second-toughest timeslot of the season (ahead of only Halloween night).

Rank	Name	TRUE	A18-49	ARank
1	American Idol Wed	6.35	5.1	1
2	American Idol Thu	5.72	4.2	3
3	NCAA Basketball (Sat-Ohio St/Syracuse)	5.36	3.7	5
4	The Voice	5.13	4.6	2
5	How I Met Your Mother	4.48	3.5	6
6	NCAA Basketball (Fri-Kentucky/Indiana)	4.15	3.2	11
7	NCIS	4.12	3.4	9
8	Dancing with the Stars Mon	3.93	3.5	6
9	2 Broke Girls	3.75	3.5	6
10	Two and a Half Men	3.64	3.8	4
11	Criminal Minds	3.62	3.2	11
12	Survivor	3.61	2.8	15
13	Mike and Molly	2.98	3.1	13
14	New Girl	2.83	2.7	17
15	Once Upon a Time	2.71	2.9	14
16	Modern Family (R)	2.50	2.0	33
17	Touch	2.46	3.3	10
18	The Biggest Loser	2.41	2.3	23
19	NCIS: Los Angeles	2.38	2.8	15
20	House	2.37	2.1	27
21	Hawaii Five-0	2.36	2.5	21
22	CSI	2.32	2.6	18
23	CSI: Miami	2.30	2.1	27
24	Last Man Standing	2.26	1.9	36
25	NCAA Basketball (Thu-Ohio St/Cincy)	2.25	2.4	22

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: The Amazing Race (t-#18 in A18-49, #27 in TRUE), Desperate Housewives (t-#18 in A18-49, #32 in TRUE) and basketball-fueled 60 Minutes (#t-#23 in A18-49, #38 in TRUE).

For more on the True Top 25, click to expand.

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!