The True Top 25, Week Ending 3/3/13 (2012-13 Week 23)

There's a new True Top 25 king in town, and his name is Modern Family. (Never mind that The Big Bang Theory was off this week.) Though Modern Family beating Idol wouldn't have been all that surprising coming into this season, it's been a bit rougher than expected road for the show, which remains down in the upper teens year-to-year. (The shows tied at 3.9 in our one decimal point raw numbers, but Modern Family had a very narrow lead there too when taking the numbers beyond one decimal point.)

Shark Tank remains the list's only Friday rep, but it was very nearly joined this time by Last Man Standing, whose very high-end week had it at a 1.97 and just a hundredth off the 25th spot. The Following and Chicago Fire were the new shows this week, as Elementary was off. The Neighbors (30th) remained within spitting distance. Golden Boy (41st) and Red Widow (56th) were a looong way off, even on premiere night.

Rank	Name	True2	A18-49	ARank
1	Modern Family	4.35	3.9	1
2	American Idol Wed	4.16	3.9	1
3	American Idol Thu	3.81	3.8	3
4	NCIS	3.52	3.4	4
5	How I Met Your Mother	3.25	3.3	5
6	The Big Bang Theory (R)	3.07	2.8	9
7	2 Broke Girls	2.93	3.3	5
8	The Bachelor	2.87	2.9	7
9	Survivor	2.82	2.6	13
10	Criminal Minds	2.79	2.6	13
11	The Following	2.76	2.8	9
12	Mike and Molly	2.64	2.7	11
13	NCIS: Los Angeles	2.63	2.9	7
14	Celebrity Wife Swap	2.56	2.4	16
15	Shark Tank	2.40	1.9	27
16	New Girl	2.39	2.3	17
17	The Middle	2.33	2.1	25
18	Rules of Engagement	2.29	2.7	11
19	Bones	2.28	2.3	17
20	The Biggest Loser	2.22	2.2	20
21	Two and a Half Men (R)	2.05	2.2	20
22	Suburgatory	2.04	2.2	20
23	The Amazing Race	2.03	2.5	15
24	Chicago Fire	1.99	2.0	26
25	Law and Order: SVU	1.98	1.6	39

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: Castle (t-#17 in A18-49, #27 in True2), The Simpsons (t-#20 in A18-49, #28 in True2) and Once Upon a Time (t-#20 in A18-49, #31 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!