The True Top 25, Week Ending 11/18/12 (2012-13 Week Eight)

Sunday Night Football easily topped the True Top 25 and a big surge by The Big Bang Theory helped widen its lead over the rest of the entertainment programming field. In a fall full of pre-emptions, there were shockingly few this week; the only usual top 25 contenders to sit out were the ABC Sunday shows, but their replacement (the American Music Awards) cracked the top ten.

The only Friday/Saturday representative this week was ABC's strong Saturday Night Football, while Revolution and Elementary were the only new shows on the list.

Rank	Name	True2	A18-49	ARank
1	Sunday Night Football	5.89	6.9	1
2	The Big Bang Theory	4.86	5.7	2
3	Modern Family	4.16	4.6	3
4	The Voice Mon	3.42	4.4	4
5	The Voice Tue	3.32	3.9	6
6	Grey's Anatomy	3.15	3.2	8
7	Saturday Night Football	3.12	2.8	17
8	Two and a Half Men	2.91	4.1	5
9	American Music Awards	2.82	3.4	7
10	2 Broke Girls	2.79	3.2	8
11	Criminal Minds	2.72	3.0	12
12	NCIS	2.70	3.1	10
13	The X Factor Wed	2.69	2.9	16
14	Person of Interest	2.62	3.1	10
15	Mike and Molly	2.44	3.0	12
16	Revolution	2.39	2.6	19
17	Survivor	2.38	2.6	19
18	The Middle	2.35	2.6	19
19	Family Guy	2.29	2.6	19
20	Elementary	2.26	2.3	28
21	The X Factor Thu	2.24	2.4	24
22	How I Met Your Mother	2.23	3.0	12
23	The Office	2.20	2.1	31
24	NCIS: Los Angeles	2.16	2.8	17
25	CSI	2.10	2.5	23

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: The Simpsons (t-#24 in A18-49, #33 in True2), The Amazing Race (t-#24 in A18-49, #34 in True2), Suburgatory (t-#24 in A18-49, #35 in True2) and 60 Minutes (t-#12 in A18-49, #45 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!