The True Top 25, Week Ending 11/10/13 (2013-14 Week Seven)

After just barely winning a week ago, Sunday Night Football took a major upswing this week and had a very comfortable win. The Big Bang Theory was back in the entertainment programming driver's seat, holding off a special CBS football game and the CMA Awards for the #2 spot. The most noteworthy development here was probably The Blacklist taking a turn as the week's #1 drama in True. The number getting this high is probably a product of a few coincidences: a higher-end Monday Night Football inflating the competition count, a very low PUT estimate, etc. (See also the Castle number below, itself probably a couple ticks overly high.) However, the show has held up admirably while The Voice has taken its usual in-season decline; at the very least, it's a strong enough show that it can grade out as the top drama when it "gets lucky."

A big spike from Undercover Boss gave Friday night a second representative, while we held at three new shows with The Millers dropping off the list (though it could be back, as it missed by less than a hundredth of a point).

Rank	Name	True	A18-49	ARank
1	Sunday Night Football	7.51	7.8	1
2	The Big Bang Theory	5.07	4.9	2
3	CBS College FB	4.69	4.1	4
4	CMA Awards	4.43	4.7	3
5	The Voice Mon	3.61	3.6	5
6	How I Met Your Mother	3.38	3.4	6
7	The Voice Tue	3.16	3.4	6
8	The Blacklist	2.94	2.9	9
9	Scandal	2.85	2.8	11
10	Grey's Anatomy	2.83	2.7	12
11	The Voice Thu	2.66	2.5	16
12	Sleepy Hollow	2.60	2.5	16
13	NCIS	2.57	2.9	9
14	Castle	2.53	2.2	22
15	Mike and Molly	2.52	2.6	13
16	Survivor	2.46	2.5	16
17	2 Broke Girls	2.36	2.6	13
18	Shark Tank	2.29	2.0	27
19	Agents of SHIELD	2.24	2.5	16
20	Undercover Boss	2.14	1.8	35
21	Once Upon a Time	2.13	2.1	24
22	Criminal Minds	2.09	2.3	21
23	Dancing with the Stars Mon	2.08	2.0	27
24	Bones	2.02	2.0	27
25	New Girl	2.02	2.0	27

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: The Millers (t-#13 in A18-49, #26 in True), NCIS: Los Angeles (#20 in A18-49, #27 in True), The Biggest Loser (t-#24 in A18-49, #32 in True), The Amazing Race (t-#22 in A18-49, #33 in True), The Crazy Ones (t-#24 in A18-49, #35 in True) and 60 Minutes (#8 in A18-49, #39 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.