The True Top 25, Week Ending 7/22/12 (2011-12 Week 44)

As hinted in my pre-summer post, I'm going to do one last edition of my regular season staple The True Top 25 for the last fully pre-Olympics week of the summer. This will be the last official use of the True Strength 1.0 number (with some info on the True 2.0 project coming very soon, I hope).

In the last couple weeks, Gordon Ramsay has taken over as the face of broadcast this summer. Though Hell's Kitchen and MasterChef have been very similarly rated in raw numbers, TRUE puts such a high value on the 8/7c hour that it gives Hell's the considerable advantage. Hell's is surprisingly now also edging America's Got Talent, which has been king for most of the summer but has really gone into a slump since the live shows began. (Can we finally put a rest to the myth that talent competitions get a boost from going into live episodes?)

Behind Kitchen and the performance night of Got Talent is a morass of low 2's shows including MasterChef, The Bachelorette (ranking very highly this week for the Sunday finale), So You Think You Can Dance and, at least so far, Big Brother, which has been a little slow out of the gate and will likely finally snap its three-summer streak of 18-49 growth.

There is really only one elite repeat option on all of TV this summer, and that's The Big Bang Theory, though on this list it looks like it's boosted new lead-out Two and a Half Men to that status as well (after it only managed low 1's on Monday). You then have to take a significant drop down to a crowded second tier of mid-1's repeaters including Fox's animation anchors (both of which were a bit low this week since Fox had the Teen Choice Awards in their regular slots), Modern Family and unscripted options like America's Funniest Home Videos and Shark Tank (#29 this week but in the top 25 the previous couple weeks). There are really not any strong drama repeaters anymore, just a bunch of CBS procedurals stuck around the low 1's.

Rank	Name	TRUE	A18-49	ARank
1	Hell's Kitchen Mon	3.10	2.6	3
2	Hell's Kitchen Tue	3.06	2.5	6
3	The Bachelorette Sun-ATFR	2.99	3.1	1
4	The Big Bang Theory (SR)	2.95	2.5	6
5	The Bachelorette Sun	2.93	3.1	1
6	America's Got Talent Tue	2.89	2.6	3
7	Big Brother Wed	2.43	2.0	12
8	MasterChef Tue	2.41	2.5	6
9	Two and a Half Men (SR-Thu)	2.22	2.1	11
10	The Bachelorette Mon	2.21	2.2	9
11	Big Brother Thu	2.21	2.2	9
12	America's Got Talent Wed	2.17	2.0	12
13	Big Brother Sun	2.13	2.0	12
14	MasterChef Mon	2.10	2.6	3
15	So You Think You Can Dance	1.92	1.8	15
16	Wipeout Thu	1.81	1.7	17
17	Fear Factor	1.61	1.5	18
18	Wipeout Tue	1.58	1.4	20
19	Modern Family (SR-9pm)	1.53	1.4	20
20	American Ninja Warrior	1.48	1.8	15
21	Dateline Fri (S)	1.45	1.2	24
22	20/20 (S)	1.43	1.2	24
23	America's Funniest Home Videos (SR)	1.41	1.2	24
24	Modern Family (SR-9:30)	1.40	1.5	18
25	Family Guy (SR-7:30)	1.38	1.2	24

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: Final Witness (t-#24 in A18-49, #27 in TRUE), NY Med (t-#24 in A18-49, #28 in TRUE), Take Me Out (t-#24 in A18-49, #30 in TRUE), 2 Broke Girls (SR) (t-#24 in A18-49, #31 in TRUE), Law and Order: SVU (SR) (t-#24 in A18-49, #32 in TRUE), Love in the Wild (#23 in A18-49, #41 in TRUE) and Two and a Half Men (SR-Mon) (t-#24 in A18-49, #50 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 the last True Top 25 (from week 36)!