The True Top 25, Week Ending 9/23/12 (2012-13 Week Negative One)

In the last week of the summer season, it was again Sunday Night Football on top, and NBC in fact took the top four spots thanks to a double-dose of The Voice and an impressive start from Revolution.

With most of the summer staples out of the mix for this week, there were a lot more repeats on the list. The Big Bang Theory remains the only really elite repeater on broadcast TV, with Family Guy and then Modern Family and other CBS sitcoms making up the second tier.

ABC's Friday lineup was on the downside, so only Shark Tank eked out a spot out of that lineup. There were actually more Saturday shows than Friday shows on the list, since a couple football games made it. Next week probably won't be a good one for the Friday/Saturday Watch.

Rank	Name	True2	A18-49	ARank
1	Sunday Night Football	6.62	8.7	1
2	The Voice Mon	4.22	4.7	2
3	The Voice Tue	4.13	4.7	2
4	Revolution	3.64	4.1	4
5	The Emmy Awards	3.64	3.9	5
6	The X Factor Thu	3.46	3.5	7
7	The X Factor Wed	3.43	3.6	6
8	Survivor	3.18	3.2	9
9	Glee	2.62	2.9	10
10	The Big Bang Theory (SR)	2.52	2.5	12
11	Go On	2.32	3.4	8
12	The Office	2.25	2.1	16
13	Notre Dame Football	2.17	2.0	18
14	The Big Bang Theory (SR)	2.14	2.1	16
15	Big Brother Wed	2.13	2.5	12
16	Bones	2.05	2.3	14
17	Saturday Night Football	1.98	1.8	21
18	Family Guy (SR)	1.93	1.9	19
19	Family Guy (SR)	1.90	1.9	19
20	Shark Tank	1.82	1.6	27
21	Modern Family (SR)	1.78	1.6	27
22	Two and a Half Men (SR)	1.77	1.7	24
23	The Voice (R)	1.76	1.7	24
24	2 Broke Girls (SR)	1.75	1.6	27
25	Two and a Half Men (SR)	1.73	1.8	21

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: Parks and Recreation (t-#24 in A18-49, #26 in True2), The New Normal (#15 in A18-49, #28 in True2), Parenthood (t-#21 in A18-49, #29 in True2) and 60 Minutes (SR) (#11 in A18-49, #49 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 last week's True Top 25!