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

Football dominated the True Top 25 in a holiday week. Though the Patriots/Jets Thanksgiving primetime game was actually four tenths weaker than the Giants/Packers Sunday game in raw numbers, it graded out much better Truly speaking because the 18-49 TV usage was nearly ten percentage points weaker on Thursday than on Sunday. And ABC's college game, the best since the network picked up regular primetime football in 2006, was an extremely strong #3.

The holiday meant pre-emptions for the two top entertainment programs, so The Voice was left on top of that pack even with (by its standards) a really horribly-rated week.

Rank	Name	True2	A18-49	ARank
1	Sunday Night Football (Thu)	9.16	7.2	2
2	Sunday Night Football	5.96	7.6	1
3	Saturday Night Football	5.30	5.1	3
4	The Voice Mon	3.21	3.7	4
5	The Voice Tue	3.14	3.4	5
6	2 Broke Girls	3.06	3.4	5
7	NCIS	2.80	3.0	9
8	Criminal Minds	2.68	2.7	15
9	The Big Bang Theory (R)	2.55	2.0	26
10	The X Factor Thu	2.53	2.8	13
11	Survivor	2.47	2.3	20
12	Mike and Molly	2.44	2.9	10
13	Once Upon a Time	2.40	3.1	8
14	How I Met Your Mother	2.38	2.9	10
15	A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving	2.36	2.2	21
16	CSI	2.33	2.4	18
17	The X Factor Wed	2.32	2.2	21
18	Two and a Half Men (R)	2.28	1.8	35
19	Family Guy	2.24	2.9	10
20	NCIS: Los Angeles	2.21	2.8	13
21	Dancing with the Stars Mon	2.16	2.4	18
22	2 Broke Girls (R-Thu)	2.15	1.7	39
23	Revolution	2.15	2.6	16
24	The Simpsons	2.06	3.3	7
25	The Amazing Race	2.01	2.5	17

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: Hawaii Five-0 (t-#21 in A18-49, #27 in True2), Revenge (t-#21 in A18-49, #40 in True2) and Go On (#25 in A18-49, #47 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!