The True Top 25, Week Ending 4/1/12 (2011-12 Week 28)

CBS finally got its hot Thursday lineup back on the air after a two-week basketball hiatus, and The Big Bang Theory reclaimed its throne atop the True Top 25 despite a raw numbers dip due to Daylight Saving Time. It's not often you'll see a Saturday show win the week in raw numbers but not Truly win the week, but it happened this time because Ohio State/Kansas had such a big lead-in from the first game of CBS' Final Four doubleheader.

In what was far from a full-strength broadcast week, two Friday shows easily made it onto this list, including 20/20's highest-in-two-years telecast on the Mega Millions lotto and another episode of Undercover Boss. Blue Bloods (2.05) was a close 26th.

Rank	Name	TRUE	A18-49	ARank
1	The Big Bang Theory	6.96	4.7	3
2	American Idol Wed	6.37	5.3	2
3	NCAA Basketball (Sat-Ohio St/Kansas)	6.07	5.5	1
4	American Idol Thu	5.95	4.4	5
5	The Voice	4.77	4.5	4
6	NCIS	4.08	3.5	6
7	Survivor	3.96	2.9	15
8	Dancing with the Stars Mon	3.29	3.2	8
9	Person of Interest	3.28	3.3	7
10	Dancing with the Stars Tue	2.92	3.1	12
11	Academy of Country Music Awards	2.81	3.1	12
12	New Girl	2.81	2.6	20
13	20/20	2.71	2.1	26
14	The Mentalist	2.70	2.7	17
15	Rules of Engagement	2.60	2.7	17
16	Once Upon a Time	2.58	2.8	16
17	NCIS: Los Angeles	2.52	3.0	14
18	Undercover Boss	2.51	1.8	39
19	Dancing with the Stars Tue Spring (R)	2.30	2.0	30
20	Community	2.29	1.7	42
21	Touch	2.28	2.7	17
22	Modern Family (R)	2.16	1.9	34
23	How I Met Your Mother (R)	2.14	1.9	34
24	Two and a Half Men (R)	2.09	2.2	25
25	Whitney	2.09	1.6	46

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: Family Guy (#22 in A18-49, #28 in TRUE), Castle (t-#23 in A18-49, #31 in TRUE) and Desperate Housewives (t-#20 in A18-49, #33 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!