The True Top 25, Week Ending 3/31/13 (2012-13 Week 27)

For the first of likely three straight weeks, NCAA basketball topped the True Top 25. The highest-rated primetime game of the week was on Easter Eve, one of the lowest-viewed nights of the season to date, so that created a huge True2 score for the game. The Thursday/Friday games also all made the list.

In entertainment programming, the two-night premiere of The Voice topped the broadcast world. Modern Family returned and once again held off both nights of American Idol, even with a pretty terrible result of its own. The Following was the only new show on the list as the return of Revolution disappointingly missed the cut at 26th. And it may not be back, if its week two drop was any indication.

Rank	Name	True2	A18-49	ARank
1	NCAA Basketball (Sat)	5.28	3.4	3
2	The Voice Mon	4.56	4.8	1
3	The Voice Tue	4.26	4.1	2
4	Modern Family	3.74	3.2	4
5	American Idol Wed	3.64	3.2	4
6	American Idol Thu	3.43	2.8	9
7	NCIS	3.42	3.2	4
8	NCAA Basketball (Thu-Late)	3.35	2.8	9
9	Grey's Anatomy	3.32	2.9	8
10	NCAA Basketball (Fri-Late)	3.08	2.3	20
11	Survivor	3.00	2.5	16
12	2 Broke Girls	2.97	3.0	7
13	How I Met Your Mother	2.84	2.7	11
14	Scandal	2.75	2.6	12
15	Mike and Molly	2.53	2.6	12
16	Dancing with the Stars Mon	2.45	2.4	18
17	The Following	2.42	2.3	20
18	Shark Tank	2.40	1.8	31
19	Dancing with the Stars Tue	2.25	2.4	18
20	Hell's Kitchen	2.20	2.0	27
21	NCIS: Los Angeles	2.19	2.6	12
22	NCAA Basketball (Thu-Early)	2.16	1.7	33
23	The Middle	2.15	1.8	31
24	NCAA Basketball (Fri-Early)	2.15	1.7	33
25	Castle	2.14	2.1	25

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: Revolution (t-#12 in A18-49, #26 in True2), Hawaii Five-0 (t-#25 in A18-49, #27 in True2), New Girl (t-#23 in A18-49, #27 in True2), Rules of Engagement (t-#23 in A18-49, #30 in True2), 60 Minutes (t-#16 in A18-49, #39 in True2) and The Amazing Race (t-#20 in A18-49, #43 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!