The True Top 25, Week Ending 12/23/12 (2012-13 Week Thirteen)

Though Sunday Night Football tied a season low in raw A18-49 numbers, it posted its fourth-highest True2 number of the season because of how low overall viewing was on the Sunday before Christmas. That gave it a very comfortable win over The Voice's finale in the week 13 True Top 25.

The networks aired quite a few holiday specials this week, but they were generally lower-priority offerings or specials that had already aired this year. So the top twenty spots still went to regular series, including six encores. Miss Universe led the specials pack at #21.

Rank	Name	True2	A18-49	ARank
1	Sunday Night Football	8.57	6.7	1
2	The Voice Tue	4.90	4.9	2
3	The Voice Mon	4.09	4.2	3
4	NCIS	3.45	3.3	6
5	2 Broke Girls	3.38	3.5	4
6	How I Met Your Mother	3.29	3.4	5
7	The X Factor Thu	3.26	3.1	8
8	Family Guy	3.18	2.5	12
9	Mike and Molly	3.02	3.3	6
10	NCIS: Los Angeles	2.99	3.0	9
11	The Big Bang Theory (R)	2.98	2.9	10
12	The X Factor Wed	2.78	2.7	11
13	The Voice (R)	2.58	2.4	13
14	Hawaii Five-0	2.53	2.4	13
15	American Dad!	2.50	2.0	19
16	The Simpsons (R)	2.40	2.1	18
17	Two and a Half Men (R)	2.31	2.3	16
18	Modern Family (R)	2.16	1.8	21
19	The Simpsons (R)	2.09	2.4	13
20	Chicago Fire	1.98	1.9	20
21	Miss Universe Competition	1.90	1.8	21
22	A Charlie Brown Christmas (R)	1.86	1.7	23
23	1600 Penn	1.82	2.2	17
24	The Year with Katie Couric	1.77	1.6	25
25	Ice Age: A Mammoth Christmas (R)	1.77	1.5	28

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: Person of Interest (R) (t-#23 in A18-49, #26 in True2), A White House Christmas (t-#25 in A18-49, #27 in True2) and Vegas (t-#25 in A18-49, #31 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!