The True Top 25, Week Ending 10/16/11 (2011-12 Week Four)

We have our third different champion in four weeks of 2011-12! The Big Bang Theory not only beats Modern Family for the first time but also holds off Two and a Half Men as well as a much weaker than usual Sunday Night Football to grade out as week four's Truly strongest show. Modern Family was one of several Wednesday shows hurt in this metric by much weaker than usual competition as a relatively weak MLB overrun replaced usual competition The X Factor. Said competition also hurt Wednesday shows like The Middle, Suburgatory and Survivor which held up nicely in 18-49 but dropped (sometimes a lot) in TRUE. Only one of the ALCS games made the True Top 25 (though Saturday's game 6 (2.29) just barely missed). The World Series should have more of a presence next week even if it is (as some expect) historically low-rated.

Also, we have our first regular Friday show to make the True Top 25! Blue Bloods edged fellow CBS 10/9c shows The Mentalist (2.33) and CSI (2.32) by the slimmest of margins. Though I did include TBS' baseball game on that Friday, it wasn't up a ton from its previous results this season and mostly just benefited from a weak baseball-hampered week in general. (Its 2.35 would've missed last week's list by over 0.3!)

Just want to note: Baseball messes with these numbers in ways that are probably more complicated than I'm able to make them. I tried to account for baseball as well as possible this week, mostly including the TBS game ratings as competition from 8-11 and even adding in some Fox 10:00 ratings. It'll be easier the next couple weeks since all the baseball will be on Fox, but mostly... will be glad when baseball is over!

Rank	Name	TRUE	A18-49	ARank
1	The Big Bang Theory	6.01	4.6	4
2	Modern Family	5.62	5.9	2
3	Two and a Half Men	5.25	5.9	2
4	Sports: Sunday Night Football	5.20	6.6	1
5	NCIS	4.07	4.0	6
6	X Factor Thu	4.03	3.7	10
7	2 Broke Girls	3.97	4.3	5
8	How I Met Your Mother	3.87	4.0	6
9	Grey's Anatomy	3.71	3.6	12
10	Last Man Standing	3.63	3.6	12
11	The Office	3.46	3.3	15
12	The Big Bang Theory (R)	3.39	3.7	10
13	Criminal Minds	3.38	3.8	9
14	Survivor	3.24	3.2	18
15	The Middle	3.15	2.9	22
16	Mike & Molly	2.69	3.9	8
17	Dancing with the Stars Mon	2.66	3.0	21
18	Suburgatory	2.65	3.1	20
19	Sports: ALCS Game 4	2.65	2.5	30
20	Hawaii Five-0	2.62	2.7	24
21	Dancing with the Stars Tue	2.55	3.3	15
22	NCIS: Los Angeles	2.54	3.3	15
23	Revenge	2.47	2.7	24
24	Person of Interest	2.44	2.8	23
25	Blue Bloods	2.35	1.8	47

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: Happy Endings (#18 in A18-49, #28 in TRUE), the Sunday X Factor (#14 in A18-49, #29 in TRUE), The Amazing Race (t-#24 in A18-49, #33 in TRUE), House (t-#24 in A18-49, #34 in TRUE) and Desperate Housewives (t-#24 in A18-49, #38 in TRUE).

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.

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. 

Here's last week's True Top 25!