The True Top 25, Week Ending 11/24/13 (2013-14 Week Nine)

Yet another Peyton Manning game on Sunday Night Football meant yet another incredible number for the second half of the season. In fact, while this game was the fifth-biggest of the season in raw numbers, it was the Truly biggest of the season-to-date, mostly because ABC's very strong American Music Awards made Sunday night much more crowded than usual.

Between those two events was top entertainment series The Big Bang Theory, dominating the entertainment pack yet again in the closest thing we'll have to a "full-strength" TV week between now and the end of 2013. Scandal was the top drama, as True maintains the Thursday 10/9c slot is a few ticks tougher than top raw numbers drama NCIS' Tuesday 8/7c. Four new shows made the cut as The Millers scraped its way back onto the list for the first time in a few weeks, replacing a pre-empted The Blacklist. Shark Tank represented Friday night once again, but just barely in a week that saw a bunch of strong sports/specials make the cutline a bit higher than normal.

Rank	Name	True	A18-49	ARank
1	Sunday Night Football	9.90	9.8	1
2	The Big Bang Theory	5.21	5.3	2
3	American Music Awards	4.57	4.5	3
4	The Voice Mon	3.58	3.5	4
5	Modern Family	3.26	3.4	5
6	The Voice Tue	3.08	3.2	6
7	Scandal	3.03	2.9	10
8	How I Met Your Mother	2.99	3.1	7
9	NCIS	2.82	3.0	8
10	Grey's Anatomy	2.73	2.6	14
11	David Blaine: Real or Magic	2.63	2.6	14
12	Criminal Minds	2.62	2.8	11
13	Sleepy Hollow	2.53	2.5	16
14	Survivor	2.49	2.5	16
15	The Middle	2.37	2.3	20
16	2 Broke Girls	2.33	2.7	13
17	Agents of SHIELD	2.30	2.4	19
18	Saturday Night Football	2.26	2.0	28
19	Mike and Molly	2.25	2.3	20
20	Almost Human	2.24	2.3	20
21	The Voice (R)	2.24	2.3	20
22	Family Guy	2.22	2.2	24
23	NCIS: Los Angeles	2.22	2.5	16
24	The Millers	2.17	2.8	11
25	Shark Tank	2.16	1.8	37

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: The Simpsons (t-#8 in A18-49, #26 in True) and The Crazy Ones (t-#24 in a18-49, #37 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.