The True Top 25, Week Ending 9/29/13 (2013-14 Week One)

The True Top 25 is back for 2013-14 with a familiar leader: Sunday Night Football. Leading the entertainment pack was the ever-growing The Big Bang Theory (with the 8:30 ep probably a bit undercounted here because it has itself as a lead-in). Lots of familiar returnees make up most of the rest of the top 10.

The biggest difference between premiere week 2013 and premiere week 2012 was the new shows. Last year's opening week True Top 25 featured only two new shows, Revolution and Elementary. This time, there were a whooping six, including four in the top 13, and an Agents of SHIELD premiere that you could at least argue was the most impressive series premiere in the Plus era. At least a couple of these shows appear to have real potential as long-term inhabitants of this list in Sleepy Hollow and The Blacklist (with SHIELD perhaps a little less certain if the Tuesday overnights are any indication).

Rank	Name	True	A18-49	ARank
1	Sunday Night Football	6.98	7.6	1
2	The Big Bang Theory (8pm)	5.78	5.5	3
3	The Big Bang Theory (8:30)	5.39	6.1	2
4	The Voice Mon	5.11	5.1	4
5	Agents of SHIELD	4.54	4.7	5
6	The Voice Tue	4.44	4.7	5
7	Modern Family	4.14	4.2	7
8	How I Met Your Mother	3.84	3.7	10
9	Grey's Anatomy	3.61	3.4	12
10	NCIS	3.59	3.6	11
11	The Blacklist	3.39	3.8	9
12	Sleepy Hollow	3.24	3.1	13
13	The Crazy Ones	3.13	3.9	8
14	2 Broke Girls	2.74	2.8	18
15	Criminal Minds	2.67	2.8	18
16	Law and Order: SVU	2.65	2.7	20
17	Saturday Night Football	2.63	2.2	32
18	Two and a Half Men	2.54	2.9	16
19	NCIS: Los Angeles	2.52	3.0	15
20	Once Upon a Time	2.50	2.6	22
21	The Goldbergs	2.47	3.1	13
22	The X Factor Wed	2.47	2.5	24
23	The Michael J. Fox Show	2.47	2.2	32
24	Dancing with the Stars Mon	2.45	2.3	28
25	The Simpsons	2.44	2.9	16

Originals missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: The Middle (t-#24 in A18-49, #26 in True), Mom (t-#24 in A18-49, #28 in True), Family Guy (t-#22 in A18-49, #29 in True) and Chicago Fire (t-#20 in A18-49, #46 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.