The True Top 25, Week Ending 12/9/12 (2012-13 Week Eleven)

Sunday Night Football won the True Top 25 yet again, with The Big Bang Theory a comfortable #1 among entertainment programs. Holiday special season contributed three of the top 15, with the always reliable Victoria's Secret Fashion Show actually cracking the top five.

As noted last week, the "fall hype" adjustment kicks in this week, meaning the scores are all a lot higher relative to the raw numbers than in past weeks this season. Quite a few shows hit True2 season highs this week, but only a few had extraordinarily huge numbers relative to the rest of the season. (Most of those were shows like Hawaii Five-0 and Scandal which were at high points in the raw numbers as well.) There's a very real chance these numbers will end up being "too high" in general in the second half of the season, because there simply may not be as drastic a general ratings decline in the spring as what we saw last year. The hope is that looking at multiple years will ultimately help create a more normal expectation for general spring declines.

Rank	Name	True2	A18-49	ARank
1	Sunday Night Football	7.44	7.8	1
2	The Big Bang Theory	5.32	5.2	2
3	The Voice Mon	3.92	3.9	4
4	Victoria's Secret Fashion Show	3.77	3.6	5
5	Two and a Half Men	3.68	4.0	3
6	Grey's Anatomy	3.55	3.0	11
7	The Voice Tue	3.48	3.5	6
8	2 Broke Girls	3.42	3.5	6
9	Mike and Molly	3.21	3.1	9
10	Modern Family (R)	3.20	2.9	13
11	Criminal Minds	3.06	3.0	11
12	How I Met Your Mother	3.06	3.1	9
13	Blake Shelton's Not-So-Family Christmas	3.01	2.7	19
14	Person of Interest	2.94	2.9	13
15	Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer	2.94	2.9	13
16	The X Factor Wed	2.91	2.8	17
17	Survivor	2.87	2.9	13
18	The X Factor Thu	2.82	2.5	21
19	Family Guy	2.75	2.8	17
20	Scandal	2.74	2.5	21
21	Hawaii Five-0	2.72	2.3	24
22	UFC	2.61	2.1	30
23	The Office	2.54	2.1	30
24	Glee	2.41	2.2	27
25	The Simpsons	2.39	3.4	8

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: The Amazing Race (#20 in A18-49, #26 in True2), The Middle (t-#24 in A18-49, #28 in True2), American Dad! (t-#24 in A18-49, #31 in True2) and Go On (#23 in A18-49, #42 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!