The True Top 25, Week Ending 9/16/12 (2012-13 Week Negative Two)

The True Top 25 is back for the penultimate week of the summer season! It may technically be summer, but the top eight spots on the list went to programming that I count under the 2012-13 banner. Several summer staples like the Gordon Ramsay shows, America's Got Talent and Big Brother likely took raw numbers hits from having to duel with the fresh and new competition.

A favorite pastime of mine during the regular season was to seek out reruns and Friday/Saturday shows that made this list. (Especially the Friday/Saturday ones, since they're less likely to make a raw numbers Top 25.) With the standards still pretty low in the pre-season, ABC's entire new Friday lineup made the cut as did their Saturday football game. (And Fox's Saturday game was close at #28.) The top two repeaters on TV all summer have been The Big Bang Theory and Family Guy, and they're the only repeat representatives in a surprisingly heavily original list.

Rank	Name	True2	A18-49	ARank
1	Sunday Night Football	6.17	8.9	1
2	The Voice Mon	3.93	4.2	2
3	The Voice Tue	3.75	4.0	3
4	The Voice Wed	3.44	3.4	4
5	The X Factor Wed	3.38	3.4	4
6	The X Factor Thu	2.93	3.1	7
7	Glee	2.89	3.1	7
8	Go On	2.63	3.4	4
9	America's Got Talent Tue	2.56	2.9	9
10	Hell's Kitchen Mon	2.52	2.5	12
11	America's Got Talent Wed	2.38	2.4	15
12	MasterChef Mon	2.38	2.6	11
13	Big Brother Wed	2.19	2.1	18
14	Shark Tank	2.18	1.8	26
15	Big Brother Thu	2.12	2.0	19
16	Big Brother Sun	2.07	2.4	15
17	The New Normal Tue	2.05	2.5	12
18	20/20	2.00	1.8	26
19	The New Normal Mon	1.96	2.5	12
20	Saturday Night Football	1.92	1.6	30
21	Family Guy (SR)	1.88	2.0	19
22	Guys with Kids	1.88	2.2	17
23	The Big Bang Theory (SR)	1.86	1.9	22
24	Family Guy (SR)	1.84	2.0	19
25	Primetime: What Would You Do?	1.80	1.7	29

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: The Simpsons (SR) (t-#22 in A18-49, #26 in True2), The Simpsons (SR) (t-#22 in A18-49, #27 in True2), Parenthood (t-#22 in A18-49, #33 in True2), and 60 Minutes (SR) (#10 in A18-49, #35 in True2).

For more on the True Top 25, click to expand.

I created the True Strength number 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 the last True Top 25 (from 2011-12 week 44)!