The True Top 25, Week Ending 9/8/13 (2012-13 Week 50)

It's the final of three True Top 25 spotlights this summer! This time we'll look at the last week of the year that's pretty much fully summer programming, with the exception of the dominant two-night return of Sunday Night Football. As when we last checked in a month ago, there's a clear elite tier of summer broadcast shows: Big Brother, Under the Dome, America's Got Talent and MasterChef (though MasterChef had a below-average week this time). Then, at least within the original realm, there's a large drop to the mid-1's level of American Ninja Warrior and So You Think You Can Dance (plus Mistresses in an above-average week).

The difference this week was a lot more repeats in that upper-1's section in the middle, with Fox's animated shows inflated by an NFL overrun lead-in. And the usually top repeats of The Big Bang Theory/Two and a Half Men, which had to face the NFL, were among the shows most damaged by that new competition.

The True Top 25 will return on a weekly basis in two weeks, the pre-premiere week when quite a few of the broadcast fall options come back in play.

Rank	Name	True	A18-49	ARank
1	Sunday Night Football	11.34	10.3	1
2	Sunday Night Football	10.85	10.0	2
3	Big Brother Thu	3.19	2.5	5
4	Under the Dome	2.78	2.7	4
5	Big Brother Sun	2.77	2.3	7
6	Big Brother Wed	2.63	2.3	7
7	America's Got Talent Tue	2.52	2.4	6
8	MasterChef	2.30	2.0	11
9	America's Got Talent Wed	2.29	2.3	7
10	MasterChef	2.09	2.2	10
12	60 Minutes (SR)	1.96	1.7	14
11	Family Guy (SR)	1.99	1.7	14
12	60 Minutes (SR)	1.96	1.7	14
13	Family Guy (SR)	1.93	1.7	14
14	Bob's Burgers (SR)	1.73	1.8	12
15	The Simpsons (SR)	1.71	2.9	3
16	The Big Bang Theory (SR)	1.68	1.5	17
17	American Ninja Warrior	1.64	1.8	12
18	America's Got Talent (R-Wed)	1.63	1.4	18
19	Shark Tank (SR)	1.63	1.1	28
20	Dateline Fri (SR)	1.62	1.2	24
21	Two and a Half Men (SR)	1.55	1.3	22
22	Off Their Rockers (SR)	1.54	1.0	38
23	NASCAR	1.52	1.2	24
24	So You Think You Can Dance	1.51	1.4	18
25	Mistresses	1.48	1.4	18

Originals missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: Extreme Weight Loss (t-#22 in A18-49, #30 in True).

For more on the True Top 25, click to expand.

I created the True 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 the 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.