The True Top 25, Week Ending 1/6/13 (2012-13 Week 15)

We rang in 2013 with a rather odd week in which the most competitive nights were typically also the least-viewed. Four of the top six True Top 25 entrants came on New Year's Eve, Friday and Saturday, and several other programs from those nights show up farther down the list (Shark Tank, Dateline, Undercover Boss and Carson Daly's special).

Among entertainment programs, The Big Bang Theory dominated with a series-high 18-49 performance on Thursday. However, it was not a True2 high for the show because of how little broadcast competition it dealt with. The big winner of the week was Chicago Fire, which went well above all previous True2 scores. It had little competition from ABC and CBS, but the bonus it got from adding in the Sugar Bowl on ESPN made it look like a pretty normal situation for the show.

Rank	Name	True2	A18-49	ARank
1	NFL Playoffs	11.82	10.5	1
2	New Year's Rockin' Eve 10-11pm	5.34	4.2	4
3	The Big Bang Theory	5.17	6.1	2
4	Cotton Bowl	4.25	3.5	7
5	Two and a Half Men	3.28	4.5	3
6	New Year's Rockin' Eve 8-10pm	3.28	2.6	13
7	Person of Interest	3.19	3.4	8
8	Family Guy	2.80	3.6	6
9	The Biggest Loser	2.68	3.0	11
10	Chicago Fire	2.60	2.4	15
11	Elementary	2.51	2.6	13
12	Once Upon a Time	2.42	3.1	9
13	Shark Tank	2.23	1.8	20
14	American Dad!	2.15	2.8	12
15	Law and Order: SVU	2.13	2.2	17
16	Modern Family (R)	2.12	2.1	18
17	The Mentalist	1.99	2.1	18
18	The Simpsons	1.96	4.2	4
19	Revenge	1.94	2.4	15
20	Dateline Fri	1.92	1.5	30
21	New Year's Eve with Carson Daly	1.86	1.2	48
22	Undercover Boss	1.81	1.5	30
23	Bob's Burgers	1.79	3.1	9
24	Mike and Molly (R)	1.77	1.6	27
25	Guys with Kids	1.76	1.7	26

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: The Good Wife (t-#20 in A18-49, #26 in True2), Whitney (t-#20 in A18-49, t-#27 in True2), The Middle (R) (t-#20 in A18-49, t-#27 in True2), Parenthood (t-#20 in A18-49, #31 in True2) and Off Their Rockers (R-9:30) (t-#20 in A18-49, #36 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!