The True Top 25, Week Ending 12/2/12 (2012-13 Week Ten)

Sunday Night Football won this relatively full-strength week's True Top 25 by a decent margin. The Big Bang Theory was the top entertainment program, holding off Modern Family. Revolution was the only new show this week with Elementary posting a weak result, and nobody from Friday/Saturday sniffed the list.

An important note is that this is the last week before the "fall hype" adjustment kicks in on True2 scores, so there will be some funny-looking week-to-week upticks in these numbers next week. However, most of these shows are currently getting lower True2 scores than they were at the beginning of the season, so the December numbers shouldn't go well above everything before. Next summer I may work on smoothing the transition out somewhat so there isn't a tendency for the True2 scores to drop in November and then abruptly get uplifted in December.

Rank	Name	True2	A18-49	ARank
1	Sunday Night Football	5.70	7.4	1
2	The Big Bang Theory	4.40	5.5	2
3	Modern Family	4.06	4.7	3
4	The Voice Mon	3.47	4.2	4
5	The Voice Tue	3.23	3.8	7
6	2 Broke Girls	3.20	4.1	5
7	NCIS	3.08	3.6	8
8	Mike and Molly	3.06	3.6	8
9	Two and a Half Men	3.04	4.0	6
10	Grey's Anatomy	2.95	3.1	13
11	The X Factor Wed	2.67	2.9	16
12	A Charlie Brown Christmas	2.64	2.9	16
13	Dancing with the Stars Tue	2.58	3.0	15
14	Criminal Minds	2.56	2.9	16
15	The Big Bang Theory (R)	2.51	3.2	12
16	The X Factor Thu	2.49	2.7	22
17	Survivor	2.47	2.7	22
18	Saturday Night Live Christmas	2.45	2.7	22
19	How I Met Your Mother	2.44	3.3	10
20	Person of Interest	2.32	2.9	16
21	Revolution	2.31	2.9	16
22	Once Upon a Time	2.20	3.1	13
23	CSI	2.20	2.6	27
24	Dancing with the Stars Mon	2.19	2.7	22
25	NCIS: Los Angeles	2.14	2.9	16

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: The Amazing Race (t-#22 in A18-49, #31 in True2) and 60 Minutes (t-#10 in A18-49, #53 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!