The True Top 25, Week Ending 2/5/12 (2011-12 Week 20)

Yes, this week gave us what will surely be our biggest overall telecast (the Super Bowl) and our biggest entertainment telecast (lead-out The Voice). Other than that, though, it was a fairly slow week. The first three days were deader than usual as most networks sat out the last few pre-sweeps days, Thursday was full strength, and then we had a Friday and a Saturday, then a Sunday on which only one network tried at all. Just 9 shows cracked the 3.00 barrier and not even a full 25 managed a 2.00. Things should ramp up a bit in the next few weeks.

One observation I made about this week was that it was almost uniformly less-overall-viewed than expected, particularly Monday through Thursday. Not sure if that was because the weather was much better this year than last or what. The relatively low viewing certainly benefited the TRUE of shows that managed to hold up or build, like Glee, Person of Interest and especially The Big Bang Theory, which rather handily beat both American Idols this week.

Rank	Name	TRUE	A18-49	ARank
1	Sports: Super Bowl	31.13	40.5	1
2	The Voice post-SB	15.12	16.3	2
3	The Big Bang Theory	7.75	5.5	4
4	American Idol Wed	7.21	6.0	3
5	American Idol Thu	7.09	5.5	4
6	Glee	3.71	3.7	6
7	Grey's Anatomy	3.71	3.6	7
8	New Girl	3.38	3.5	8
9	Person of Interest	3.29	3.3	9
10	The Office	2.97	2.8	14
11	Rob	2.94	3.3	9
12	House	2.92	2.9	12
13	The Mentalist	2.71	2.9	12
14	Modern Family (R)	2.66	2.7	17
15	Two and a Half Men (R)	2.65	3.0	11
16	2 Broke Girls (R)	2.61	2.7	17
17	How I Met Your Mother (R)	2.48	2.5	20
18	The Bachelor	2.41	2.6	19
19	Alcatraz	2.24	2.8	14
20	Special: Super Bowl's Greatest Commercials	2.23	2.0	26
21	Winter Wipeout	2.18	1.8	31
22	20/20	2.09	1.7	34
23	Blue Bloods	2.05	1.7	34
24	Private Practice	2.01	2.3	22
25	The Biggest Loser Spring	1.91	2.1	24

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: Mobbed (t-#14 in A18-49, #29 in TRUE), Criminal Minds (R) (t-#24 in A18-49, #32 in TRUE), The Finder (#21 in A18-49, #34 in TRUE) and Mike and Molly (R) (t-#22 in A18-49, #38 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!