The True Top 25, Week Ending 5/5/13 (2012-13 Week 32)

In the first fully May sweeps week of the season, the order at the top wasn't surprising: The Big Bang Theory, then a big drop to The Voice and Modern Family. American Idol continued its downward movement, this time dropping well behind an NCIS that surged to its best True2 score since the season premiere.

The full-fledged arrival of May sweeps meant a lot of competition for the True Top 25 slots, and many a usual list-maker like New Girl and The Office missed out despite True2 scores that weren't all that atypical. The finale of The Following was the only new show, while Shark Tank was the only Friday/Saturday show.

Rank	Name	True2	A18-49	ARank
1	The Big Bang Theory	6.02	4.9	1
2	The Voice Mon	4.45	4.3	2
3	The Voice Tue	4.43	3.9	3
4	Modern Family	4.10	3.6	4
5	NCIS	3.91	3.1	6
6	American Idol Wed	3.48	2.9	8
7	Grey's Anatomy	3.30	3.0	7
8	American Idol Thu	3.29	2.6	11
9	Two and a Half Men	3.20	3.2	5
10	How I Met Your Mother	3.18	2.7	9
11	Survivor	3.01	2.4	14
12	The Following	2.83	2.7	9
13	2 Broke Girls	2.80	2.6	11
14	Criminal Minds	2.71	2.4	14
15	Scandal	2.70	2.6	11
16	The Middle	2.59	2.0	27
17	Hell's Kitchen	2.58	2.0	27
18	The Amazing Race	2.43	2.4	14
19	Mike and Molly	2.38	2.4	14
20	American Dad!	2.38	2.3	19
21	Shark Tank	2.37	1.7	39
22	Bones	2.37	2.1	23
23	Person of Interest	2.35	2.4	14
24	Family Guy	2.33	2.2	20
25	Dancing with the Stars Mon	2.31	2.1	23

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: NCIS: Los Angeles (t-#20 in A18-49, #29 in True2), How to Live (t-#23 in A18-49, #30 in True2), Once Upon a Time (t-#20 in A18-49, #32 in True2) and Rules of Engagement (t-#23 in A18-49, #33 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!