The True Top 25, Week Ending 2/26/12 (2011-12 Week 23)

The official Big Bang Theory coronation will have to wait one more week, as this week's True Top 25 crown belonged to Oscar. But a BBT takeover now seems inevitable, with a disastrous week for American Idol throwing it squarely behind Big Bang and also behind The Voice. Next stop: Modern Family? Could happen as early as next week, the way things are going.

I said Undercover Boss could become the first Friday show to regularly make this list, and I won't rule that out just yet. It was #26 this week at a 2.26. We'll see if this was a down week or if breaking 2.0 was just a one-week thing.

Rank	Name	TRUE	A18-49	ARank
1	Special: Academy Awards	11.52	11.7	1
2	The Big Bang Theory	6.87	5.3	3
3	The Voice	5.91	6.0	2
4	American Idol Wed	5.63	5.1	4
5	American Idol Thu	5.61	4.5	6
6	Modern Family	5.35	4.8	5
7	How I Met Your Mother	4.10	3.8	9
8	NCIS	3.84	3.6	10
9	Two and a Half Men	3.82	4.2	7
10	2 Broke Girls	3.81	4.0	8
11	Criminal Minds	3.15	3.1	12
12	Survivor	3.14	2.8	20
13	Grey's Anatomy	3.13	3.1	12
14	Glee	3.10	3.0	15
15	Person of Interest	2.89	3.1	12
16	CSI	2.85	2.9	17
17	Hawaii Five-0	2.80	2.9	17
18	New Girl	2.71	3.0	15
19	Mike and Molly	2.71	3.4	11
20	The Office	2.70	2.6	22
21	The Middle	2.56	2.2	30
22	Rob	2.53	2.9	17
23	The Mentalist	2.50	2.6	22
24	The Bachelor	2.39	2.5	24
25	House	2.34	2.4	25

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: NCIS: Los Angeles (#21 in A18-49, #28 in TRUE) and Happy Endings (t-#25 in A18-49, #37 in TRUE).

For more on the True Top 25, click to expand.

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!