The True Top 25, Week Ending 10/28/12 (2012-13 Week Five)

Sunday Night Football won the True Top 25 once again, holding off the top comedies on ABC and CBS. Modern Family held off The Big Bang Theory in a week when TBBT didn't have very much competition. Outside of those usual suspects, it was a highly irregular week; most of the Monday programming was shortened or off the air due to a debate and Fox had five nights fully devoted to baseball. All four World Series games and both NFL games made the list, and a huge result from Grimm put it on the list for the first time.

Rank	Name	True2	A18-49	ARank
1	Sunday Night Football	5.55	7.0	1
2	Modern Family	4.66	4.9	3
3	The Big Bang Theory	4.62	5.0	2
4	The Voice Tue	3.96	4.3	5
5	World Series (Thu)	3.74	3.5	9
6	World Series (Sun)	3.73	4.7	4
7	World Series (Wed)	3.61	3.6	8
8	The Voice Mon	3.56	4.3	5
9	Two and a Half Men	3.31	3.7	7
10	Saturday Night Football	3.29	2.9	14
11	Grey's Anatomy	3.14	3.0	13
12	NCIS	3.04	3.2	11
13	World Series (Sat)	3.04	2.8	16
14	Criminal Minds	2.83	3.1	12
15	Person of Interest	2.67	2.9	14
16	Survivor	2.66	2.8	16
17	Once Upon a Time	2.55	3.4	10
18	The Middle	2.55	2.6	22
19	New Girl	2.43	2.7	19
20	Dancing with the Stars Tue	2.24	2.3	28
21	NLCS (Mon)	2.16	2.4	24
22	NCIS: Los Angeles	2.14	2.8	16
23	Grimm	2.11	2.0	33
24	Dancing with the Stars Mon	2.11	2.4	24
25	CSI	2.08	2.4	24

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: Suburgatory (t-#19 in A18-49, #28 in True2), Revenge (t-#19 in A18-49, #29 in True2), The Amazing Race (#23 in A18-49, #31 in True2) and Go On (t-#24 in A18-49, #46 in True2).

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

I created the True Strength number 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!