The True Top 25, Week Ending 9/25/11 (Premiere Week)

I created the True Strength number last summer 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 my new 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.

Pretty interesting stuff this week, as we see that the post-Two and a Half Men episode of 2 Broke Girls still performed quite respectably but not quite as hugely as its A18-49 rating indicated. As expected from what I did this summer, some of the biggest positive movers are shows that air in the relatively low-viewed Wednesday 8/7c and Thursday 8/7c timeslots.

Rank	Name	TRUE	A18-49	ARank
1	Two and a Half Men	11.68	10.7	1
2	Sports: Sunday Night Football	6.92	8.3	2
3	Modern Family	6.60	6.1	4
4	The Big Bang Theory (8:00)	6.36	4.9	7
5	The Big Bang Theory (8:30)	5.53	5.1	6
6	2 Broke Girls	5.17	7.1	3
7	How I Met Your Mother (8:30)	5.05	5.2	5
8	NCIS	5.02	4.3	11
9	How I Met Your Mother (8:00)	4.95	4.7	9
10	X Factor Wed	4.85	4.4	10
11	X Factor Thu	4.66	4.3	11
12	Glee	4.66	4.0	16
13	New Girl	4.30	4.8	8
14	The Office	4.27	3.9	18
15	Criminal Minds	4.19	4.1	13
16	Grey's Anatomy	4.02	4.1	13
17	Dancing with the Stars Mon	3.95	4.0	16
18	Survivor	3.61	3.2	24
19	The Middle	3.55	3.1	28
20	Family Guy	3.23	4.1	13
21	Castle	2.91	3.2	24
22	CSI	2.88	3.2	24
23	Pan Am	2.88	3.1	28
24	NCIS: Los Angeles	2.86	3.6	20
25	The Simpsons	2.86	3.9	18

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: Hawaii Five-0 (#21 in A18-49, #26 in TRUE), Whitney (#t-22 in A18-49, #29 in TRUE) and Revenge (#t-22 in A18-49, #30 in TRUE).

Another important note: 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.