The True Top 25, Week Ending 4/14/13 (2012-13 Week 29)

The last college basketball game of the season dominated the True Top 25, and ascendant The Voice had a sizable lead over the rest of the entertainment programming field. With usual entertainment leader The Big Bang Theory in repeats, Modern Family nabbed top scripted honors.

The Following and a relatively promising second week of How to Live represented the new shows. Friday couldn't crack the list this time with usual contenders Shark Tank and Grimm sitting out, but Saturday picked up the slack thanks to a NASCAR race.

Rank	Name	True2	A18-49	ARank
1	NCAA Championship	8.95	8.4	1
2	The Voice Tue	5.08	4.4	3
3	The Voice Mon	5.04	5.0	2
4	Modern Family	3.82	3.8	4
5	American Idol Thu	3.67	3.2	5
6	American Idol Wed	3.50	3.2	5
7	The Big Bang Theory (R-Thu)	3.33	3.0	7
8	NCIS	3.25	2.7	9
9	Criminal Minds	3.05	3.0	7
10	Survivor	3.01	2.6	11
11	The Following	2.67	2.2	18
12	NCIS: Los Angeles	2.62	2.7	9
13	CSI	2.50	2.4	14
14	The Middle	2.48	2.0	23
15	How to Live	2.40	2.5	12
16	Hell's Kitchen	2.33	1.9	27
17	Dancing with the Stars Mon	2.30	2.1	21
18	Family Guy	2.28	2.5	12
19	Dancing with the Stars Tue	2.21	2.0	23
20	New Girl	2.20	2.2	18
21	Glee	2.19	2.4	14
22	The Big Bang Theory (R-Mon)	2.19	2.0	23
23	Two and a Half Men (R)	2.16	2.0	23
24	NASCAR	2.16	1.6	36
25	The Office	2.12	1.9	27

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: Revolution (t-#18 in A18-49, #34 in True2), The Amazing Race (t-#18 in A18-49, #35 in True2), American Dad! (t-#21 in A18-49, #38 in True2) and 60 Minutes (t-#16 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!