The True Top 25, Week Ending 1/29/12 (2011-12 Week 19)

The final full week of January was an extremely slow one as almost all of the usual suspects squeezed in an extra repeat before sweeps begins. American Idol officially topped the True Top 25 for the first time, but The Big Bang Theory soared on Thursday despite facing American Idol and posted its biggest TRUE of the season. It beat the Thursday Idol in TRUE and was pretty close to the Wednesday one. It feels like Big Bang topping the TRUE charts even against Idol (and maybe even the raw 18-49 charts) is almost inevitable at this point considering Idol's usual late-season dips.

Rank	Name	TRUE	A18-49	ARank
1	American Idol Wed	7.52	6.5	1
2	The Big Bang Theory	7.27	5.5	2
3	American Idol Thu	6.59	5.5	2
4	Criminal Minds	3.39	3.7	6
5	Sports: Pro Bowl	3.34	4.3	4
6	American Idol Wed (R)	3.27	3.4	9
7	Once Upon a Time	2.99	3.5	7
8	CSI	2.97	3.4	9
9	Rob	2.89	3.5	7
10	Touch	2.84	3.9	5
11	House	2.72	3.1	11
12	Undercover Boss	2.62	3.0	13
13	Sports: UFC	2.52	2.4	20
14	Modern Family (R)	2.38	2.5	19
15	Two and a Half Men (R)	2.38	2.9	15
16	Alcatraz	2.36	3.0	13
17	Family Guy	2.31	3.1	11
18	2 Broke Girls (R)	2.24	2.6	18
19	The Bachelor Spring	2.23	2.7	17
20	The Simpsons	2.17	2.4	20
21	CSI: Miami	1.96	2.3	24
22	The Biggest Loser Spring	1.96	2.1	27
23	30 Rock (8pm)	1.90	1.6	40
24	Castle	1.86	2.1	27
25	How I Met Your Mother (R)	1.86	2.3	24

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: The Finder (#16 in A18-49, #28 in TRUE), Mike and Molly (R) (t-#20 in A18-49, #29 in TRUE) and American Dad! (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!