The True Top 25, Week Ending 5/13/12 (2011-12 Week 34)

Even though we've still got another week and a half of sweeps, Week 34 was really the last full-strength week of the season, since perennial contenders The Big Bang Theory and The Voice both wrapped things up. Big Bang topped the charts for one last time, while The Voice bounced back in finale week with its two best performances in about a month. ABC had a good week as their Sunday drama finales both posted their Truly strongest performances of the whole season on a crowded yet oddly low-viewed Sunday. But fellow Sunday finale Survivor did not get its typical spike and thus Truly suffered.

Nobody from Friday/Saturday made it this week, but Shark Tank was in 26th place and should have a shot next week when several of this week's top 25 will be out of the picture.

Rank	Name	TRUE	A18-49	ARank
1	The Big Bang Theory	7.25	4.4	2
2	American Idol Thu	6.20	4.0	5
3	Modern Family	5.33	4.4	2
4	American Idol Wed	5.27	4.5	1
5	The Voice Tue	4.96	4.4	2
6	The Voice Mon	4.28	3.8	6
7	2 Broke Girls	4.10	3.3	9
8	Grey's Anatomy	4.06	3.5	8
9	Two and a Half Men	3.92	3.8	6
10	Once Upon a Time	3.73	3.3	9
11	NCIS	3.70	3.1	12
12	Survivor (Wednesday)	3.53	2.8	17
13	Glee	3.14	2.7	19
14	Rules of Engagement	3.02	2.7	19
15	New Girl	3.01	2.8	17
16	NCIS: Los Angeles	2.96	3.0	14
17	Dancing with the Stars Mon	2.90	2.7	19
18	Criminal Minds	2.89	2.9	15
19	Desperate Housewives	2.89	3.2	11
20	Survivor (Sunday)	2.89	2.9	15
21	The Office	2.82	2.3	28
22	Person of Interest	2.73	2.6	22
23	Dancing with the Stars Tue	2.57	2.4	23
24	CSI	2.52	2.4	23
25	Mike and Molly	2.49	3.1	12

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: The Mentalist (t-#23 in A18-49, #28 in TRUE), Castle (t-#23 in A18-49, #33 in TRUE) and Family Guy (t-#23 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!