The True Top 25, Week Ending 1/1/12 (2011-12 Week 15)

The last week of 2011 brought one last True Top 25 win for NBC's Sunday Night Football (but NBC football should win again this week with their Saturday playoff game). Despite being over two points stronger in A18-49, this Giants/Cowboys matchup was actually a little Truly weaker than last week's game because of the drastic difference in viewing levels between New Year's Day and the week-ago Christmas Day.

Despite the win, Sunday Night Football was surprisingly somewhat pushed by ABC's primetime New Year's Rockin' Eve special on New Year's Eve. The special had one of the worst Sitch scores you'll ever see (-74%) thanks to pulling a pretty huge rating on what should go down as the least-viewed evening of the 2011-12 regular season. No doubt the last hour benefited from two additional hours of the special leading in.

Most of the rest of the list (19 of 25) belonged to repeats of entertainment programming. As usual, most of those repeats were on CBS. Also as usual, The Big Bang Theory is the best repeater by a decent margin. The only scripted original of the week was Friday's Chuck, and it wasn't within striking distance of the top 25 (finishing at #58).

Rank	Name	TRUE	A18-49	ARank
1	Sports: Sunday Night Football	8.24	9.8	1
2	Special: New Year's Rockin' Eve	7.13	4.1	2
3	Special: New Year's Rockin' Eve 40th Anniversary Party	3.66	2.5	5
4	The Big Bang Theory (R)	2.79	2.8	4
5	CSI (R)	2.22	2.1	8
6	Two and a Half Men (R)	2.22	2.4	6
7	Criminal Minds (R)	2.02	2.4	6
8	Mike and Molly (R)	1.99	2.1	8
9	The Mentalist (R)	1.77	1.7	16
10	2 Broke Girls (R)	1.75	1.9	12
11	NCIS (R)	1.73	2.1	8
12	Special: New Year's Eve with Carson Daly	1.59	0.9	55
13	Rules of Engagement (R)	1.58	2.1	8
14	Modern Family (R)	1.52	1.9	12
15	60 Minutes	1.50	2.9	3
16	Dateline Fri	1.50	1.2	30
17	CSI: NY (R)	1.37	1.2	30
18	NCIS: Los Angeles (R)	1.36	1.8	14
19	Family Guy (R)	1.36	1.7	16
20	The Middle (R-Tue)	1.35	1.4	26
21	Fear Factor (R)	1.35	1.5	20
22	Hawaii Five-0 (R)	1.34	1.6	19
23	Person of Interest (R)	1.34	1.7	16
24	How I Met Your Mother (R-Mon)	1.33	1.8	14
25	Last Man Standing (R-8:30)	1.27	1.5	20

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: Who's Still Standing? (t-#20 in A18-49, #26 in TRUE), American Dad! (R) (t-#20 in A18-49, #31 in TRUE), Last Man Standing (R-8pm) (t-#20 in A18-49, #32 in TRUE) and The Simpsons (R) (t-#20 in A18-49, #33 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!