The True Top 25, Week Ending 4/22/12 (2011-12 Week 31)

This was the last fully non-sweeps week of the season, but a decent number of the heavy hitters participated. Lots of familiar stuff: American Idol won pretty handily. Modern Family was the top scripted program pretty handily since The Big Bang Theory was in repeats. The Voice kept fading. Thanks to a Friday that saw all the heavy hitters sit out, nobody on that evening made the list. That's all I got. Bring on sweeps.

Rank	Name	TRUE	A18-49	ARank
1	American Idol Thu	5.76	4.0	3
2	American Idol Wed	5.69	4.8	1
3	Modern Family	5.14	4.1	2
4	The Voice Mon	4.04	3.7	5
5	Two and a Half Men	3.98	3.8	4
6	How I Met Your Mother	3.90	3.1	9
7	The Big Bang Theory (R)	3.87	2.5	18
8	NCIS	3.77	3.1	9
9	2 Broke Girls	3.47	3.4	6
10	Grey's Anatomy	3.44	3.3	7
11	Survivor	3.36	2.8	14
12	The Voice Tue	3.32	3.3	7
13	Dancing with the Stars Mon	3.08	2.9	13
14	Glee	2.81	2.4	20
15	Once Upon a Time	2.80	3.0	12
16	Mike and Molly	2.77	3.1	9
17	The Biggest Loser	2.68	2.3	21
18	New Girl	2.62	2.7	15
19	Rules of Engagement	2.57	2.2	23
20	Dancing with the Stars Tue	2.48	2.5	18
21	The Office	2.47	2.2	23
22	Bones	2.42	2.2	23
23	The Amazing Race	2.38	2.6	16
24	Suburgatory	2.25	2.0	29
25	Apartment 23	2.16	2.6	16

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: Revenge (t-#21 in A18-49, #26 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!