The True Top 25, Week Ending 12/4/11 (2011-12 Week 11)

Welcome to December. Not even ten shows could break a 3.00 TRUE, and while that number should go back up next week (with the ABC and CBS comedies back into originals), it'll probably go down even farther in the subsequent December weeks. Even a below-average Sunday Night Football fairly comfortably won the crown, with the next two spots (both in TRUE and raw numbers) going to CBS' huge Tuesday night specials. The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show in particular did amazing work.

The top scripted show was actually a repeat (Thursday's Big Bang Theory). New Girl was the top scripted original for the first time, but we had to reach all the way down to #8 on this list to find a scripted original.

Rank	Name	TRUE	A18-49	ARank
1	Sunday Night Football	6.22	7.4	1
2	Special: Victoria's Secret Fashion Show	4.90	4.6	2
3	Special: Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer	4.07	4.0	3
4	The X Factor Wed	4.03	3.7	5
5	Survivor	3.47	3.1	11
6	The Big Bang Theory (R)	3.32	3.0	14
7	The X Factor Thu	3.29	3.1	11
8	New Girl	3.26	3.6	6
9	Glee	3.14	3.2	9
10	How I Met Your Mother (R)	2.96	3.0	14
11	2 Broke Girls (R)	2.84	3.3	8
12	Once Upon a Time	2.82	3.2	9
13	The Office	2.81	2.9	16
14	The Simpsons	2.79	4.0	3
15	Family Guy	2.74	3.6	6
16	Modern Family (R)	2.72	2.6	22
17	Last Man Standing	2.46	2.4	29
18	Fox College FB (Big 10 Championship)	2.43	2.5	26
19	Special: How the Grinch Stole Christmas	2.40	2.5	26
20	Two and a Half Men (R)	2.39	3.1	11
21	Bones	2.39	2.8	17
22	The Amazing Race	2.34	2.7	20
23	Law and Order: SVU	2.34	2.2	34
24	The Biggest Loser	2.25	2.4	29
25	NCIS (R)	2.24	2.8	17

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: House (t-#22 in A18-49, #29 in TRUE), Mike and Molly (R) (t-#22 in A18-49, #32 in TRUE), I Hate My Teenage Daughter (t-#17 in A18-49, #35 in TRUE) and Desperate Housewives (t-#20 in A18-49, #41 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!