The True Top 25, Week Ending 5/20/12 (2011-12 Week 35)

In the last full week of the 2011-12 season, the show formerly known as Death Star got back on top, as its penultimate week telecasts sat in the #1 and #2 positions for the first time in four weeks. A tip of the cap to The Big Bang Theory for sitting out the final week. That left Modern Family as the top scripted program, though it was seriously challenged by a couple extremely strong drama finales from NCIS and Grey's Anatomy.

Shark Tank gave Friday night one last look at this list as it held off the penultimate episode of House by a hundredth of a point. A surprisingly big finale from Grimm had its third-biggest TRUE of the season (2.08) and finished in 32nd.

Rank	Name	TRUE	A18-49	ARank
1	American Idol Thu	6.16	4.4	2
2	American Idol Wed	5.90	4.9	1
3	Modern Family	4.98	3.9	4
4	NCIS	4.84	3.6	8
5	Grey's Anatomy	4.66	4.1	3
6	How I Met Your Mother	4.43	3.7	6
7	America's Got Talent Mon	4.18	3.7	6
8	America's Got Talent Tue	4.17	3.4	10
9	Two and a Half Men	4.13	3.9	4
10	Criminal Minds	4.09	3.6	8
11	The Big Bang Theory (R)	3.74	2.5	18
12	Mike and Molly	3.34	3.4	10
13	Glee (8pm)	3.22	2.5	18
14	NCIS: Los Angeles	3.04	3.0	12
15	Dancing with the Stars Mon	2.96	2.6	15
16	Hawaii Five-0	2.84	2.7	13
17	Person of Interest	2.74	2.5	18
18	The Mentalist	2.71	2.5	18
19	Glee (9pm)	2.69	2.5	18
20	The Bachelorette	2.67	2.6	15
21	Dancing with the Stars Tue	2.56	2.2	24
22	The Simpsons	2.54	2.1	27
23	Billboard Music Awards	2.52	2.7	13
24	The Middle	2.38	1.9	30
25	Shark Tank	2.32	1.6	39

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: House (t-#24 in A18-49, #26 in TRUE), Family Guy (t-#15 in A18-49, #27 in TRUE), and Scandal (#23 in A18-49, #29 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!