The True Top 25, Week Ending 4/28/13 (2012-13 Week 31)

May sweeps are here, and The Big Bang Theory reclaimed the top position in the True Top 25. Its numbers were depressed a bit on NFL Draft night, so it lost the raw number crown to Monday's The Voice. The Following and Elementary remained the only reliable list-makers among the new crop, while Shark Tank, Undercover Boss and Fox's Saturday NASCAR all represented the weekend crowd.

A few shows have caught some notable late-season fire; Survivor hit a season high in both raw numbers and True2, Scandal tied its series high in raw numbers and exploded again in a True sense*, and Shark Tank again cracked the raw ratings top 25 and found yet another True2 high (pulling a 2.0 on a Friday with a measly 0.6 lead-in!).

*- I've noted this on the daily threads, but to reiterate: as last year, I applied the combined ESPN/NFLN ratings for the NFL Draft as cable competition on Thursday and Friday. While this does a very good job of "normalizing" shows like the CBS/NBC Thursday lineups, it probably serves to inflate the ABC/Fox True scores somewhat. In Scandal's case, beyond not being affected quite as much by the Draft, it's also a pretty safe bet that the Draft's combined rating was noticeably less than 3.6 by the 10:00 hour.

Rank	Name	True2	A18-49	ARank
1	The Big Bang Theory	5.83	4.5	2
2	The Voice Mon	4.82	4.9	1
3	The Voice Tue	4.24	4.1	3
4	American Idol Thu	3.78	2.8	6
5	American Idol Wed	3.55	3.3	4
6	Survivor	3.31	2.9	5
7	Scandal	3.30	2.8	6
8	Grey's Anatomy	3.28	2.7	10
9	Two and a Half Men	3.18	2.8	6
10	NCIS	3.01	2.8	6
11	Shark Tank	2.93	2.0	19
12	Person of Interest	2.66	2.4	13
13	Family Guy	2.49	2.6	12
14	The Following	2.47	2.4	13
15	Elementary	2.43	2.0	19
16	NCIS: Los Angeles	2.40	2.7	10
17	Undercover Boss	2.37	1.7	30
18	The Amazing Race	2.32	2.4	13
19	Dancing with the Stars Mon	2.24	2.1	17
20	Bones	2.20	2.0	19
21	The Office	2.20	1.7	30
22	NASCAR	2.20	1.5	40
23	Hell's Kitchen	2.19	2.0	19
24	Castle	2.15	2.3	16
25	Law and Order: SVU	2.12	1.9	26

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: Dancing with the Stars Tue (t-#19 in A18-49, #26 in True2), The Simpsons (t-#17 in A18-49, #27 in True2), Once Upon a Time (t-#19 in A18-49, #30 in True2) and Revolution (t-#19 in A18-49, #61 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!