The True Top 25, Week Ending 3/24/13 (2012-13 Week 26)

Hey, whaddaya know?! American Idol is back atop the True Top 25! Mostly it can thank the absence of The Big Bang Theory, Modern Family or any other events of note (including The Voice's premiere, which should beat it next week). Both nights of Idol dropped yet again week-to-week, and the Thursday edition actually fell behind top scripted show NCIS (plus several other shows in raw numbers). Dancing with the Stars had a solid return and cracked the top 5, but a generally weak showing from the CBS March Madness games meant only the Saturday game even made the list at all. (The early Thursday game was #26.)

The Following continues to represent the new shows despite a sizable drop against the arrival of Dancing, while the Splash premiere also impressed. The only Friday show was the very impressive finale of Last Man Standing, which had one of the best True2 scores this season for an ABC sitcom not named The Middle or Modern Family.

Rank	Name	True2	A18-49	ARank
1	American Idol Wed	3.83	3.6	1
2	NCIS	3.39	3.2	2
3	American Idol Thu	3.28	2.9	7
4	Criminal Minds	3.11	3.0	4
5	Dancing with the Stars Mon	3.03	3.2	2
6	How I Met Your Mother	3.03	3.0	4
7	Grey's Anatomy	3.01	3.0	4
8	NCAA Basketball Sat	2.82	2.1	25
9	Survivor	2.81	2.6	12
10	Splash	2.80	2.6	12
11	Scandal	2.75	2.7	10
12	The Biggest Loser	2.60	2.7	10
13	NCIS: Los Angeles	2.57	2.9	7
14	2 Broke Girls	2.50	2.8	9
15	The Following	2.35	2.5	15
16	New Girl	2.29	2.3	18
17	Family Guy	2.28	2.6	12
18	Hell's Kitchen	2.19	2.0	29
19	Modern Family (R)	2.18	1.8	31
20	CSI	2.17	2.3	18
21	Mike and Molly	2.16	2.4	16
22	Bones	2.14	2.1	25
23	Last Man Standing	2.10	1.6	40
24	Rules of Engagement	2.07	2.3	18
25	Hawaii Five-0	2.06	2.1	25

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: Castle (t-#23 in A18-49, #27 in True2), Dancing with the Stars Tue special (t-#25 in A18-49, #31 in True2), The Amazing Race (t-#16 in A18-49, #32 in True2), American Dad! (t-#18 in A18-49, #38 in True2) and 60 Minutes (t-#18 in A18-49, #48 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!