The True Top 25, Week Ending 11/4/12 (2012-13 Week Six)

Let's hope, for everyone's sake, for no more natural disasters. With the exception of Halloween on Wednesday, this was an extremely high-viewed week of television, yet that for the most part did not show up in the entertainment programming ratings. This is particularly evident in the True2 numbers toward the beginning of the week, when coverage of Hurricane Sandy appeared to drastically lift viewing levels yet much of that local affiliate coverage was not quantifiable in national ratings.

A best-in-a-month Sunday Night Football easily topped the charts. (And by more than it previously would have thanks to a recent fix in the sports program calculation!) In a reversal of what we've come to expect from their situations, The Big Bang Theory only barely held off Modern Family for top entertainment program despite a full point raw-numbers advantage. TBBT's Thursday 8/7c slot was (on CMA Awards night) easily the highest-viewed it's been all season while Modern Family's Wednseday 9/8c slot on Halloween was easily at its lowest-viewed.

ABC had what I think I'm safe in calling the best Friday night with regular programming for any network in several years, and three of those programs made it onto the list for at least this one week. CBS also joined the Friday/Saturday Watch thanks to a huge college football game on Saturday. Malibu Country also joined usual Top 25ers Revolution and Elementary as a third show on what's been a pretty thin year for new shows on this list.

Rank	Name	True2	A18-49	ARank
1	Sunday Night Football	6.82	8.5	1
2	The Big Bang Theory	4.35	5.2	2
3	Modern Family	4.21	4.2	5
4	CBS College FB	4.00	4.0	6
5	The Voice Tue	3.65	4.6	4
6	CMA Awards	3.46	3.8	7
7	The Voice Mon	3.39	4.8	3
8	It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown	2.88	2.7	17
9	NCIS	2.85	3.4	10
10	Criminal Minds	2.78	2.9	13
11	The X Factor Wed	2.77	2.7	17
12	Two and a Half Men	2.66	3.6	8
13	Survivor	2.66	2.5	22
14	Person of Interest	2.45	2.9	13
15	Once Upon a Time	2.44	3.5	9
16	Last Man Standing	2.29	2.0	37
17	Revolution	2.28	3.0	12
18	Shark Tank	2.27	2.3	28
19	Malibu Country	2.22	2.3	28
20	Elementary	2.19	2.4	25
21	CSI	2.18	2.4	25
22	The X Factor Thu	2.15	2.3	28
23	Family Guy	2.15	2.5	22
24	NCIS: Los Angeles	2.10	2.8	16
25	2 Broke Girls (R)	2.09	2.5	22

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: Revenge (t-#17 in A18-49, #27 in True2), The Amazing Race (t-#20 in A18-49, #30 in True2), Suburgatory (t-#25 in A18-49, #31 in True2), NBC News Sandy Special (t-#13 in A18-49, #34 in True2) and 60 Minutes (t-#10 in A18-49, #54 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!