The True Top 25, Week Ending 5/6/12 (2011-12 Week 33)

I've had The Big Bang Theory as the Truly strongest show on TV for a good chunk of the season. So now that it's that way in raw numbers too, of course it's going to widen its margin on the True Top 25. The show hit its highest TRUE of the season this week and finished nearly two whole points ahead of both American Idol airings.

The penultimate Monday airing of The Voice continued the show's downward trajectory, as it now Truly ranks behind five scripted shows. It should bounce back next week for its finale airings.

The Friday/Saturday Watch welcomed Shark Tank to the True Top 25 for just the second time this season, even though it only made it by seven thousandths of a point. (It had a 2.522 vs. 26th place Family Guy's 2.515.)

Rank	Name	TRUE	A18-49	ARank
1	The Big Bang Theory	7.76	4.7	1
2	American Idol Thu	5.86	4.0	4
3	American Idol Wed	5.75	4.7	1
4	Modern Family	4.63	4.1	3
5	How I Met Your Mother	4.00	3.3	8
6	NCIS	3.76	3.1	11
7	Grey's Anatomy	3.65	3.3	8
8	The Voice Mon	3.51	3.5	7
9	Survivor	3.42	2.6	21
10	Two and a Half Men	3.33	3.8	5
11	2 Broke Girls	3.33	3.6	6
12	The Voice Tue	3.29	3.1	11
13	Criminal Minds	3.11	3.0	13
14	NCIS: Los Angeles	3.00	3.0	13
15	Glee	2.97	2.5	22
16	The Middle	2.74	2.0	38
17	Once Upon a Time	2.70	3.0	13
18	Dancing with the Stars Mon	2.64	2.8	16
19	Rules of Engagement	2.63	2.7	17
20	The Office	2.61	2.3	27
21	Mike and Molly	2.58	3.2	10
22	The Biggest Loser	2.55	2.2	32
23	Shark Tank	2.52	1.8	46
24	The Mentalist	2.52	2.5	22
25	Dancing with the Stars Tue	2.52	2.4	26

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: Family Guy (t-#17 in A18-49, #26 in TRUE), Person of Interest (t-#22 in A18-49, #27 in TRUE), The Amazing Race (t-#17in A18-49, #28 in TRUE), Desperate Housewives (t-#17 in A18-49, #31 in TRUE) and Hawaii Five-0 (t-#22 in A18-49, #34 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!