The True Top 25, Week Ending 9/30/12 (2012-13 Week One)

Sunday Night Football won premiere week in the True Top 25. If you were following these last year, it's a bit of a surprise to see Modern Family back on top of The Big Bang Theory for top entertainment program, because BBT was crushing it late last season. To be determined in the coming weeks: was it just an Emmy bounce for Modern Family, or can it consistently stay ahead in that race?

Just two new shows made it onto the list, the seemingly still legit Revolution and CBS' drama Elementary. Somewhat surprisingly, Elementary was actually the #2 drama on CBS this week, so that's a very promising start. The Neighbors was the biggest raw numbers premiere of the week, but it took a hit because it had a huge lead-in and just barely missed the cut here at #26. Other new shows in the bottom half of the top 50: Last Resort (2.34, #29), Partners (2.14, #37), Go On (2.11, #38), Vegas (2.03, #43), The Mindy Project (1.99, #44), Ben and Kate (1.95, #46) and 666 Park Ave (1.86, #48). Overall, it does not look like a very promising crop of newbies. (Then again, just three new shows were on last year's premiere week list, but many of the strong fall shows premiered after premiere week last year.)

Rank	Name	True2	A18-49	ARank
1	Sunday Night Football	6.43	9.0	1
2	Modern Family	5.14	5.5	2
3	The Big Bang Theory	4.98	5.0	3
4	Grey's Anatomy	4.43	4.4	4
5	The Voice Tue	4.17	4.2	6
6	NCIS	4.08	4.1	7
7	The Voice Mon	4.04	4.4	4
8	The X Factor Wed	3.38	3.4	13
9	The X Factor Thu	3.33	3.2	17
10	Revolution	3.33	3.4	13
11	Once Upon a Time	3.33	3.9	8
12	2 Broke Girls	3.30	3.7	10
13	How I Met Your Mother	3.27	3.6	11
14	Survivor	3.07	3.1	20
15	Two and a Half Men	3.02	3.5	12
16	Elementary	3.02	3.1	20
17	New Girl (8pm)	2.98	2.8	26
18	Criminal Minds	2.93	3.1	20
19	The Middle	2.88	2.9	24
20	Family Guy	2.88	3.3	16
21	Person of Interest	2.83	2.9	24
22	Mike and Molly	2.73	3.1	20
23	NCIS: Los Angeles	2.71	3.4	13
24	New Girl (9pm)	2.64	2.8	26
25	Revenge	2.61	3.2	17

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: The Neighbors (t-#17 in A18-49, #26 in True2) and The Simpsons (#9 in A18-49, #31 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!