The True Top 25, Week Ending 5/27/12 (2011-12 Week 36)

The 36th and perhaps final True Top 25 of the 2011-12 season features the last three days of the regular season plus a handful of shows from the first four days of summer. With quite a few of the typical heavyweights sitting out, it was all about American Idol finale week, as the special Tuesday telecast and the Wednesday finale led the field pretty easily. It was slim pickings among scripted originals, where Modern Family easily beat The Middle and the series finale of House.

The final Friday/Saturday Watch featured a solid showing from the NBA's Celtics and 76ers in a Game 7 on Saturday, and 20/20 took a rare turn on this list even in what is typically one of its only repeat weeks of the whole year.

Rank	Name	TRUE	A18-49	ARank
1	American Idol Wednesday	7.69	6.4	1
2	American Idol Tuesday	5.49	4.4	2
3	Modern Family	4.70	4.1	3
4	NBA Playoffs	4.02	2.6	10
5	America's Got Talent Mon	3.76	3.2	6
6	Dancing with the Stars Tue	3.56	3.3	4
7	America's Got Talent Tue	3.43	3.3	4
8	Dancing with the Stars Mon	3.32	2.9	7
9	The Big Bang Theory (SR)	3.09	2.3	16
10	So You Think You Can Dance Wed	2.87	2.4	11
11	The Middle	2.85	2.0	20
12	House	2.78	2.9	7
13	NASCAR	2.66	2.1	17
14	Glee	2.53	2.9	7
15	Modern Family (R-8:30)	2.49	2.1	17
16	House (R)	2.30	2.1	17
17	Revenge	2.29	2.4	11
18	American Ninja Warrior	2.26	2.4	11
19	The Bachelorette	2.25	2.4	11
20	The Big Bang Theory (R)	2.21	1.6	27
21	Law and Order: SVU	2.10	2.0	20
22	Off Their Rockers	2.05	1.5	34
23	20/20 (SR)	2.02	1.5	34
24	Apartment 23	2.00	2.4	11
25	Duets	1.99	1.7	24

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: NCIS (R) (#23 in A18-49, #26 in TRUE), Two and a Half Men (t-#20 in A18-49, #27 in TRUE), Rules of Engagement (SR) (t-#24 in A18-49, #28 in TRUE) and America's Got Talent (R-Tue) (t-#24 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!