The True Top 25, Week Ending 11/13/11 (2011-12 Week Eight)

The NFL is back on top of the True Top 25, fairly comfortably beating usual scripted champ The Big Bang Theory. With ABC's Modern Family-led lineup out of the mix, Big Bang went basically unchallenged for top scripted honors, but Modern's replacement for the week (The CMA Awards) drastically improved the night as a whole for ABC and ranked a solid third on this list.

Rank	Name	TRUE	A18-49	ARank
1	Sunday Night Football	6.99	8.1	1
2	The Big Bang Theory	6.28	5.3	2
3	The CMA Awards	5.22	4.8	4
4	Two and a Half Men	4.77	5.2	3
5	How I Met Your Mother	4.55	4.4	6
6	NCIS	4.35	4.1	8
7	2 Broke Girls	4.22	4.6	5
8	Grey's Anatomy	4.22	4.1	8
9	The X Factor Wed	4.04	3.8	10
10	Mike and Molly	3.77	4.2	7
11	The X Factor Thu	3.61	3.3	18
12	Survivor	3.61	3.2	19
13	Hawaii Five-0	3.42	3.1	20
14	Criminal Minds	3.41	3.4	14
15	New Girl	3.37	3.5	12
16	Glee	3.26	3.1	20
17	Dancing with the Stars Mon	3.26	3.4	14
18	Once Upon a Time	3.21	3.8	10
19	Saturday Night Football	3.21	3.0	23
20	Rules of Engagement	3.19	3.5	12
21	The Office	3.15	3.0	23
22	NCIS: Los Angeles	3.01	3.4	14
23	UFC	2.95	3.0	23
24	Last Man Standing	2.79	2.6	31
25	Castle	2.69	2.4	35

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: Family Guy (t-#20 in A18-49, #28 in TRUE), The Simpsons (t-#14 in A18-49, #33 in TRUE) and Desperate Housewives (t-#23 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!