The True Top 25, Week Ending 1/20/13 (2012-13 Week 17)

American Idol's back, and (at least while The Big Bang Theory is in reruns) it's well ahead of the rest of the entertainment programming field. But it lost out big-time to CBS' AFC Championship Game on this week's True Top 25.

A season high Undercover Boss represented for Friday night while Shark Tank was in repeats, and Nashville made a rare appearance to give the new shows a spot.

Rank	Name	True2	A18-49	ARank
1	AFC Championship	12.34	16.8	1
2	American Idol Wed	5.48	6.0	2
3	American Idol Thu	5.34	5.6	3
4	Modern Family	4.36	4.3	4
5	NCIS	3.59	3.9	6
6	How I Met Your Mother	3.44	3.9	6
7	Grey's Anatomy	3.37	3.0	12
8	2 Broke Girls	3.22	4.1	5
9	Criminal Minds	3.18	2.9	13
10	The Big Bang Theory (R)	3.15	3.2	11
11	The Big Bang Theory (R)	2.98	3.7	8
12	Mike and Molly	2.83	3.5	9
13	Once Upon a Time	2.58	2.4	17
14	Hawaii Five-0 (Sun)	2.46	3.5	9
15	Scandal	2.39	2.6	15
16	The Bachelor	2.34	2.5	16
17	The Middle	2.33	2.3	20
18	The Office	2.28	2.1	25
19	The Biggest Loser	2.26	2.4	17
20	Undercover Boss	2.23	1.9	28
21	NCIS: Los Angeles	2.23	2.7	14
22	Parks and Recreation	2.15	1.9	28
23	Two and a Half Men (R)	2.14	2.3	20
24	Nashville	2.10	2.2	24
25	CSI	2.07	2.3	20

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: Hawaii Five-0 (Mon) (t-#17 in A18-49, #26 in True2) and Bones (t-#25 in A18-49, #28 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!