The True Top 25, Week Ending 4/29/12 (2011-12 Week 32)

Week 32 was a "semi-sweeps" week, as many of the big Monday to Wednesday lineups sat out their last pre-sweeps opportunity but everyone was back in action starting on Thursday. Despite some (relative to previous results) awful showings from the CBS Thursday block, The Big Bang Theory was still able to comfortably top the charts. Grey's Anatomy, showing some late-season signs of life, was tops among dramas. Though The Voice had its first up rating in seven results, its TRUE descent continues (as it faced little competition on Monday).

In this week's edition of the Friday/Saturday Watch, Undercover Boss was back on the list, while Blue Bloods, 20/20, Shark Tank and strong Saturday performers The Blind Side and NASCAR all congregated right around 30th place and missed this list by about 0.2 points.

Rank	Name	TRUE	A18-49	ARank
1	The Big Bang Theory	5.89	4.1	2
2	American Idol Thu	5.32	4.0	3
3	American Idol Wed	5.03	4.8	1
4	The Voice Mon	3.89	3.8	4
5	Grey's Anatomy	3.49	3.3	6
6	The Voice Tue	3.37	3.4	5
7	Dancing with the Stars Mon	3.17	3.2	7
8	Glee	3.16	2.7	10
9	Survivor	3.10	2.7	10
10	Once Upon a Time	2.84	3.0	8
11	The Biggest Loser	2.58	2.2	20
12	New Girl	2.54	2.6	12
13	Dancing with the Stars Tue	2.44	2.4	15
14	Bones	2.43	2.2	20
15	Family Guy	2.40	2.8	9
16	The Mentalist	2.38	2.2	20
17	The Simpsons	2.33	2.3	17
18	The Office	2.33	2.1	25
19	Rules of Engagement	2.32	2.5	13
20	Undercover Boss	2.30	1.6	46
21	Person of Interest	2.28	2.4	15
22	NCIS (R)	2.26	2.0	28
23	Modern Family (R)	2.19	2.2	20
24	The Amazing Race	2.18	2.3	17
25	Revenge	2.17	2.1	25

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: Private Practice (t-#20 in A18-49, #26 in TRUE), House (t-#17in A18-49, #34 in TRUE), Desperate Housewives (t-#13 in A18-49, #37 in TRUE) and Monday's 20/20 special (t-#25 in A18-49, #43 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!