The True Top 25, Week Ending 1/13/13 (2012-13 Week 16)

Week 16 was somewhat close to full-strength for the broadcasters, as 22 of the True Top 25 spots went to entertainment originals. But a big NFL game on Saturday and the Golden Globes on Sunday each made the top three. The Big Bang Theory hit another new high and blew away the rest of the entertainment field, and second-place Modern Family had a resounding lead over #3.

The big winner of the week was Scandal, which returned well above previous results in raw numbers and cracked the top 10 in True2 for the first time. Shark Tank was the lone Friday representative, and Chicago Fire joined Elementary once again on the New Show Watch. (So did the Deception premiere, which did OK and got a large boost from facing the BCS National Championship, but I expect it'll be off the list starting next week.)

Rank	Name	True2	A18-49	ARank
1	NFL Playoffs	13.78	11.1	1
2	The Big Bang Theory	5.95	6.4	2
3	Golden Globe Awards	4.97	6.4	2
4	Modern Family	4.43	4.7	4
5	Grey's Anatomy	3.51	3.2	9
6	NCIS	3.14	3.5	6
7	Two and a Half Men	3.07	4.2	5
8	Person of Interest	3.07	3.3	7
9	Scandal	2.88	2.8	12
10	People's Choice Awards	2.79	2.7	14
11	Family Guy	2.66	3.2	9
12	NCIS: Los Angeles	2.56	3.0	11
13	The Biggest Loser	2.56	2.4	16
14	The Office	2.47	2.2	23
15	The Bachelor	2.46	2.3	21
16	Elementary	2.45	2.4	16
17	Once Upon a Time	2.43	2.8	12
18	Shark Tank	2.42	2.0	30
19	Deception	2.36	2.0	30
20	Chicago Fire	2.32	2.2	23
21	Law and Order: SVU	2.28	2.1	25
22	Castle	2.26	1.9	33
23	New Girl	2.19	2.1	25
24	The Simpsons	2.19	2.4	16
25	The Middle	2.16	2.4	16

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: Nashville (t-#25 in A18-49, #26 in True2), The Mentalist (t-#25 in A18-49, #27 in True2), Suburgatory (#15 in A18-49, #29 in True2), American Dad! (t-#16 in A18-49, #31 in True2), Bob's Burgers (t-#21 in A18-49, #37 in True2), The Neighbors (t-#25 in A18-49, #40 in True2) and 60 Minutes (t-#7 in A18-49, #65 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!