The True Top 25, Week Ending 3/4/12 (2011-12 Week 24)

There was a tie atop the broadcast standings in raw 18-49 (adding a decimal point, The Voice technically won 5.44 to 5.36), but it was the historically strong Thursday edition of American Idol that topped The Voice in TRUE because it came on a much less-viewed evening. Still, The Voice topped the two semifinal performance episodes. With The Big Bang Theory in repeats, Modern Family topped the scripted world, but only Modern and How I Met Your Mother were even able to top the repeat of Big Bang.

Among this week's debuts: GCB (2.33) just barely missed the top 25 and got a True boost in the final calculation due to an abnormally low viewing calculation at 10:00. Even so, it'd likely be the big four's Truly weakest renewal of the season to date should it find a way to get there. Awake (2.14) ranked 33rd, but more importantly, it did top the pack of otherwise-tightly bunched NBC drama contenders. Will that still be the case next week?

Rank	Name	TRUE	A18-49	ARank
1	American Idol Thu	6.01	5.4	1
2	The Voice	5.63	5.4	1
3	American Idol Wed	5.38	5.0	4
4	Modern Family	5.32	4.8	5
5	American Idol Tue	5.22	5.1	3
6	Sports: Daytona 500	4.59	4.5	6
7	How I Met Your Mother	4.22	3.6	8
8	The Big Bang Theory (R)	3.95	3.2	12
9	2 Broke Girls	3.79	3.8	7
10	NCIS	3.71	3.5	10
11	Survivor Spring	3.30	2.9	15
12	Two and a Half Men	3.30	3.6	8
13	Once Upon a Time	2.98	3.4	11
14	The Middle	2.94	2.6	20
15	Criminal Minds	2.93	3.1	13
16	NCIS: Los Angeles	2.72	3.1	13
17	Rob	2.63	2.6	20
18	Hawaii Five-0	2.59	2.5	24
21	The Bachelor Spring	2.59	2.6	20
19	The Office	2.59	2.5	24
20	CSI	2.57	2.6	20
22	The Amazing Race Spring	2.49	2.8	17
23	Revenge	2.47	2.4	28
24	Undercover Boss	2.47	2.0	38
25	Last Man Standing	2.34	2.2	32

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: NCIS: Los Angeles (#21 in A18-49, #28 in TRUE) and Happy Endings (t-#25 in A18-49, #37 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!