The True Top 25, Week Ending 10/14/12 (2012-13 Week Three)

Sunday Night Football won the True Top 25 once again, this time holding off the entertainment options fairly easily. A Modern Family doubleheader took the next two spots. Thursday's vice presidential debate held several top 25 mainstays off the list, while seemingly depressing the numbers of the 8/7c occupants that were left over (like The Big Bang Theory and Thursday's The X Factor).

Shark Tank is again the lone Friday/Saturday representative, and an off week for Elementary means Revolution is the lone new show representative. Nashville was a top 25 show in raw numbers but not a True Top 25 member thanks to its huge Modern Family lead-in (it scored just a 2.02, good for #28).

Rank	Name	True2	A18-49	ARank
1	Sunday Night Football	5.42	7.7	1
2	Modern Family (9pm)	4.46	4.8	3
3	Modern Family (9:30)	4.26	4.9	2
4	The Voice Mon	4.10	4.8	3
5	The Big Bang Theory	4.06	4.5	5
6	The Voice Tue	4.00	4.5	5
7	The X Factor Wed	3.36	3.5	7
8	NCIS	3.13	3.4	9
9	2 Broke Girls	2.97	3.4	9
10	Criminal Minds	2.83	3.0	12
11	How I Met Your Mother	2.70	3.1	11
12	Survivor	2.66	2.8	17
13	The X Factor Thu	2.63	2.9	16
14	Two and a Half Men	2.55	3.5	7
15	New Girl	2.53	2.7	20
16	Once Upon a Time	2.46	3.0	12
17	Revolution	2.45	3.0	12
18	Mike and Molly	2.40	2.8	17
19	The Middle	2.39	2.4	25
20	NCIS: Los Angeles	2.32	3.0	12
21	Castle	2.19	2.2	26
22	CSI	2.15	2.6	21
23	Shark Tank	2.10	1.8	41
24	The Amazing Race	2.09	2.6	21
25	The Mentalist	2.07	2.1	29

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: Revenge (t-#21 in A18-49, #26 in True2), Nashville (t-#17 in A18-49, #28 in True2) and Go On (t-#21 in A18-49, #33 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!