The True Top 25, Week Ending 12/16/12 (2012-13 Week Twelve)

A huge late-season result from Sunday Night Football won the True Top 25 yet again. The Big Bang Theory grew a bit in its Christmas episode and beat a low-end Modern Family by a mile for the entertainment lead. This is the last close to "full-strength" week of 2012, and CBS had 16 of the 25 spots.

Two Friday shows made the list: CBS' second run this season of Rudolph and NBC's Newtown coverage on Dateline. A rising Elementary snuck back onto the list and gave the new class a representative.

Rank	Name	True2	A18-49	ARank
1	Sunday Night Football	8.37	8.7	1
2	The Big Bang Theory	5.96	5.4	2
3	Modern Family	4.57	4.2	4
4	Two and a Half Men	3.72	4.1	5
5	The Voice Tue	3.62	3.6	9
6	2 Broke Girls (9pm)	3.53	3.7	8
7	The Voice Mon	3.47	3.8	6
8	Grey's Anatomy	3.41	2.9	14
9	2 Broke Girls (9:30)	3.30	3.8	6
10	Criminal Minds	3.12	3.1	12
11	Survivor Wed	2.90	2.8	16
12	NCIS	2.89	2.8	16
13	Survivor Sun	2.88	3.2	10
14	The X Factor Wed	2.86	2.7	18
15	Person of Interest	2.85	2.9	14
16	How I Met Your Mother	2.85	3.2	10
17	60 Minutes	2.81	4.9	3
18	The X Factor Thu	2.81	2.4	21
19	The Big Bang Theory (R)	2.70	3.0	13
20	Hawaii Five-0	2.59	2.5	20
21	Dateline Fri	2.57	2.0	29
22	Scandal	2.51	2.4	21
23	Elementary	2.40	2.3	23
24	Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (R)	2.37	1.9	33
25	NCIS: Los Angeles	2.29	2.6	19

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: CSI (t-#24 in A18-49, #27 in True2), Take It All Monday (t-#24 in A18-49, #35 in True2) and Take It All Tuesday (t-#24 in A18-49, #42 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!