The True Top 25, Week Ending 5/19/13 (2012-13 Week 34)

In the last full week of the 2012-13 season, The Big Bang Theory had one last big win, spiking in the True2 numbers thanks to greater competition than usual. Once the TV event of the season, Thursday's finale of American Idol was a very distant second and could've easily been even lower. Several other shows like NCIS, How I Met Your Mother and The Office were hugely above average thanks to impressive finale bumps.

The season finale of Shark Tank finished off an incredible season with one last berth to represent Friday night programming, while a very impressive penultimate week of Chicago Fire managed to eke out a spot for the underwhelming new class of 2012-13. The return of So You Think You Can Dance managed the #24 spot (with the Tuesday premiere just a hundredth behind at #26).

Rank	Name	True2	A18-49	ARank
1	The Big Bang Theory	6.53	4.8	1
2	American Idol Thu	4.39	3.6	4
3	Modern Family	4.34	3.7	3
4	The Voice Mon	4.16	3.8	2
5	NCIS	4.00	3.4	7
6	How I Met Your Mother	3.94	3.4	7
7	The Voice Tue	3.93	3.5	5
8	Grey's Anatomy	3.68	3.1	11
9	American Idol Wed	3.55	3.0	12
10	The Big Bang Theory (R-Thu)	3.53	3.3	9
11	Billboard Music Awards	3.48	3.5	5
12	The Office	3.36	3.0	12
13	2 Broke Girls	3.23	3.0	12
14	Scandal	3.14	3.2	10
15	Criminal Minds	3.02	2.6	15
16	The Office (Retrospective)	2.87	2.1	22
17	Shark Tank (9:00)	2.66	1.9	32
18	NCIS: Los Angeles	2.61	2.5	17
19	Family Guy (9:00)	2.55	2.6	15
20	The Big Bang Theory (R-Mon)	2.53	2.4	19
21	Family Guy (9:30)	2.52	2.5	17
22	The Voice (R-Tue)	2.43	2.0	26
23	New Girl	2.36	2.1	22
24	So You Think You Can Dance (Wed)	2.33	2.3	21
25	Chicago Fire	2.32	2.0	26

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: Mike and Molly (t-#19 in A18-49, #29 in True2), Castle (t-#22 in A18-49, #31 in True2) and The Simpsons 8:30 (t-#22 in A18-49, #35 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!