The True Top 25, Week Ending 12/15/13 (2013-14 Week Twelve)

A season-low Sunday Night Football held off The Big Bang Theory for another True Top 25 crown as most entertainment programs finished out their 2013 original runs. A surging midseason finale of Scandal was broadcast's top drama, while Fox had more representation than usual thanks to a really good Sunday for their animated comedies. The Millers joined Agents of SHIELD and Sleepy Hollow to make it a trio of new shows on the list, while Shark Tank was, as usual, the only Friday series.

Rank	Name	True	A18-49	ARank
1	Sunday Night Football	5.69	5.6	1
2	The Big Bang Theory	5.34	5.1	2
3	Modern Family	3.61	3.5	3
4	Scandal	3.56	3.2	7
5	Victoria's Secret Fashion Show	3.41	3.4	6
6	The Voice Mon	3.27	3.5	3
7	NCIS	2.98	2.9	10
8	Family Guy	2.93	3.0	9
9	Grey's Anatomy	2.91	2.7	11
10	The Voice Tue	2.74	3.1	8
11	Survivor (Sun)	2.65	2.6	12
12	The Simpsons	2.51	3.5	3
13	Shark Tank	2.44	2.0	23
14	Survivor (Wed)	2.30	2.5	14
15	Criminal Minds	2.22	2.4	15
16	Agents of SHIELD	2.20	2.1	22
17	The Sing-Off (Mon)	2.17	2.4	15
18	American Dad!	2.17	2.4	15
19	Sleepy Hollow	2.12	2.2	20
20	Mike and Molly	2.08	2.0	23
21	Elementary	2.02	1.7	35
22	The Millers	2.00	2.6	12
23	The Biggest Loser	2.00	1.9	26
24	Bob's Burgers	1.97	2.4	15
25	Once Upon a Time	1.93	1.9	26

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: NCIS: Los Angeles (t-#15 in A18-49, #27 in True), The Middle (t-#23 in A18-49, #28 in True) and Chicago Fire (t-#20 in A18-49, #29 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.