The True Top 25, Week Ending 1/15/12 (2011-12 Week 17)

Football's domination of the True Top 25 certainly continues during playoff season. Tebow Time on Saturday may have been a blowout, and it may have even been a ratings disappointment because of that, but it was still over twice as big as any of the entertainment options.

With CBS Monday in repeats, there were fewer of the 3.00+ shows than usual even though many other entertainment options re-entered the picture. The Big Bang Theory actually won the entertainment week even in raw numbers, so of course its lead on Modern Family in TRUE was fairly substantial. Fox put its animated players high on this list thanks to the NFL halo effect, which seemingly can't totally be accounted for in the shows that aren't direct lead-ins. (The Simpsons as a direct lead-out to football was fairly close to its average TRUE, but Family Guy was well above average).

TRUE pretty much liked the opening performances of Napoleon Dynamite and Rob, but expect it to grade harshly in subsequent weeks if there are big drops.

Rank	Name	TRUE	A18-49	ARank
1	Sports: NFL Playoffs	14.82	12.5	1
2	The Big Bang Theory	5.81	5.3	3
3	Modern Family	4.80	5.1	4
4	Special: Golden Globe Awards	4.79	5.0	5
5	NCIS	3.87	4.1	8
6	Rob	3.75	4.1	8
7	Family Guy	3.72	4.4	6
8	Grey's Anatomy	3.69	3.8	10
9	Napoleon Dynamite (8:30)	3.55	4.4	6
10	Once Upon a Time	3.14	3.3	11
11	The Middle	3.04	2.9	17
12	The Office	2.86	2.9	17
13	Undercover Boss	2.79	3.0	15
14	Person of Interest	2.79	3.2	14
15	The Mentalist	2.50	2.7	20
16	The Simpsons	2.49	5.4	2
17	Suburgatory	2.49	2.9	17
18	Napoleon Dynamite (9:30)	2.47	3.3	11
19	NCIS: Los Angeles	2.43	3.3	11
20	Bones	2.42	2.4	23
21	Special: People's Choice Awards	2.35	2.5	22
22	Happy Endings	2.35	3.0	15
23	Revenge	2.25	2.4	23
24	Castle	2.22	2.3	27
25	Desperate Housewives	2.17	2.7	20

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: The Biggest Loser (t-#23 in A18-49, #35 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!