The True Top 25, Week Ending 12/30/12 (2012-13 Week 14)

Ah, the last week of the year. Only four programs broke a 2.0 A18-49 rating, only five broke a 2.00 True2 score, and only two original programs (football and 60 Minutes) made it into the True Top 25. I could utter some platitude about how this week is interesting in its own way, that it allows us to once again pick out TV's elite repeat options, but I will spare you this time.

Rank	Name	True2	A18-49	ARank
1	Sunday Night Football	10.42	10.5	1
2	The Big Bang Theory (R)	2.90	3.3	2
3	Dateline Fri (R)	2.15	1.7	8
4	Movie: It's a Wonderful Life (R)	2.15	1.5	15
5	Family Guy (R)	2.06	1.8	6
6	Modern Family (R)	1.99	1.7	8
7	Two and a Half Men (R)	1.98	2.2	4
8	Mike and Molly (R)	1.86	1.2	22
9	Person of Interest (R)	1.83	1.9	5
10	2 Broke Girls (R)	1.82	1.2	22
11	Elementary (R)	1.81	1.6	12
12	Movie: How the Grinch Stole Christmas	1.79	1.7	8
13	American Dad! (R)	1.75	1.5	15
14	Shark Tank (R)	1.68	1.4	18
15	How the Grinch Stole Christmas (R)	1.68	1.8	6
16	60 Minutes	1.64	1.6	12
17	NCIS: Los Angeles (R)	1.61	1.5	15
18	Movie: Shrek the Third	1.61	1.1	25
19	How I Met Your Mother (R)	1.60	1.0	33
20	Shrek the Halls (R)	1.60	1.0	33
21	Criminal Minds (R)	1.57	1.7	8
22	Law and Order: SVU (R)	1.56	1.3	21
23	Bob's Burgers (R)	1.51	1.6	12
24	NCIS (R)	1.51	1.4	18
25	48 Hours (R)	1.50	1.0	33

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: The Kennedy Center Honors (t-#18 in A18-49, #26 in True2), The Simpsons (R) (#3 in A18-49, #32 in True2) and a ton of repeats tied for 25th in A18-49.

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!