The True Top 25, Week Ending 2/24/13 (2012-13 Week 22)

The Academy Awards comfortably topped the primetime charts this week. The Big Bang Theory again won easily among entertainment programs, while Modern Family actually held off both American Idol airings this week. Grey's Anatomy was the top broadcast drama, as it actually grew against a two-hour American Idol while NCIS (despite its 0.4 raw numbers advantage) had the usual nothing competition on Tuesday.

Shark Tank represented the Friday crowd, while still strong The Following and solid Elementary were the new shows this week. Two other new shows were close to the list: Chicago Fire (#26) and The Neighbors (#30 and a best-since-premiere number).

Rank	Name	True2	A18-49	ARank
1	Academy Awards	8.26	13.0	1
2	The Big Bang Theory	5.63	5.6	2
3	Modern Family	4.40	4.0	4
4	American Idol Wed	4.27	4.1	3
5	American Idol Thu	4.00	3.9	5
6	Grey's Anatomy	3.40	3.1	11
7	2 Broke Girls	3.20	3.5	7
8	NCIS	3.16	3.5	7
9	How I Met Your Mother	3.13	3.4	9
10	Two and a Half Men	3.10	3.9	5
11	The Bachelor (Mon)	2.82	3.0	12
12	Mike and Molly	2.82	3.2	10
13	The Following	2.81	2.9	13
14	Criminal Minds	2.75	2.6	18
15	Person of Interest	2.71	2.9	13
16	Scandal	2.70	2.7	16
17	The Bachelor (Tue)	2.63	2.6	18
18	Survivor	2.62	2.4	20
19	The Middle	2.50	2.3	22
20	Shark Tank	2.47	1.9	30
21	Elementary	2.43	2.4	20
22	CSI	2.41	2.3	22
23	NCIS: Los Angeles	2.38	2.7	16
24	New Girl	2.34	2.2	25
25	Rules of Engagement	2.24	2.9	13

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: Castle (t-#22 in A18-49, #27 in True2) and Bones (t-#25 in A18-49, #28 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!