The True Top 25, Week Ending 2/3/13 (2012-13 Week 19)

The NFL was back for one last domination of the True Top 25; the Super Bowl had over seven times the raw numbers of anything else this week and about five times the True2 score.

The Big Bang Theory beat both nights of American Idol in the first week of the season in which both aired. Several of the Monday to Wednesday staples sat out on their last night before February sweeps began. Three new shows actually made the list this time, led by a promising second week of The Following. And Shark Tank and Undercover Boss both represented the Friday crowd, the latter in its last airing before going to hiatus so CBS can air The Job.

Rank	Name	True2	A18-49	ARank
1	Super Bowl	26.69	39.7	1
2	The Big Bang Theory	5.40	5.4	3
3	American Idol Wed	5.01	5.5	2
4	American Idol Thu	4.54	4.5	4
5	NCIS	3.21	3.8	6
6	Two and a Half Men	3.20	3.9	5
7	Grey's Anatomy	3.08	2.8	10
8	The Following	3.01	3.3	7
9	Person of Interest	3.00	3.2	8
10	Scandal	2.87	2.7	11
11	NCIS: Los Angeles	2.41	3.1	9
12	New Girl	2.40	2.6	12
13	Shark Tank	2.37	1.9	24
14	Modern Family (R)	2.32	2.2	17
15	The Bachelor	2.32	2.5	14
16	Undercover Boss	2.30	1.9	24
17	Bones	2.30	2.6	12
18	Elementary	2.26	2.2	17
19	The Big Bang Theory (R)	2.26	2.4	15
20	The Office (9pm)	2.16	2.1	19
21	The Biggest Loser	2.15	2.3	16
22	The Office (9:30)	2.10	1.9	24
23	30 Rock	2.06	1.9	24
24	Super Bowl's Greatest Commercials	2.06	2.0	22
25	Chicago Fire	2.04	2.1	19

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: 2 Broke Girls (t-#22 in A18-49, #28 in True2), Glee (t-#19 in A18-49, #35 in True2) and Vegas (t-#24 in A18-49, #41 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!