The True Top 25, Week Ending 4/21/13 (2012-13 Week 30)

With high-rated college basketball finally out of the way, The Voice got its turn atop the True Top 25. Not only is it crushing American Idol within each calendar week, but in week 30 it finally pulled ahead of the corresponding week of the Idol season. (In other words, its fourth Monday had a 5.2 vs. Idol's 4.6 fourth Wednesday.) Next stop is eclipsing the Idol season-to-date average over the same number of episodes; it'll take a few more weeks for that to happen, but it certainly appears to be coming.

I'm rambling about singing competitions because most of broadcast's scripted heavy hitters were in repeats in the last fully non-sweeps week of the season. The top two scripted shows were actually repeats of The Big Bang Theory. How I Met Your Mother got a rare turn as the top scripted original, while one must go all the way down to #19 to find the top original drama episode, ABC's Once Upon a Time.

Coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings made its presence felt on the list, and it probably would've been bigger if not for most of the Friday coverage not counting in finals. Friday's 20/20 and Rock Center joined NBC's post-Voice Monday special on the list. Saturday also got a nod thanks to Fox's UFC.

Rank	Name	True2	A18-49	ARank
1	The Voice Tue	4.95	4.6	2
2	The Voice Mon	4.86	5.2	1
3	The Big Bang Theory (R)	3.60	3.1	5
4	American Idol Thu	3.46	3.0	6
5	American Idol Wed	3.42	3.4	3
6	The Big Bang Theory (R)	3.29	3.3	4
7	Survivor	2.93	2.7	8
8	How I Met Your Mother	2.91	2.7	8
9	Two and a Half Men (R)	2.49	2.4	10
10	Hell's Kitchen	2.42	2.1	18
11	UFC	2.40	1.8	29
12	2 Broke Girls	2.36	2.4	10
13	Dancing with the Stars Tue	2.35	2.2	13
14	NCIS (R)	2.32	2.2	13
15	The Amazing Race	2.31	2.4	10
16	Dancing with the Stars Mon	2.26	2.2	13
17	Terror in Boston (Mon)	2.20	3.0	6
18	Rock Center	2.20	1.9	26
19	Once Upon a Time	2.15	2.1	18
20	Modern Family (R)	2.13	2.0	23
21	The Following	2.11	2.1	18
22	Mike and Molly	2.11	2.2	13
23	20/20	2.07	1.7	33
24	2 Broke Girls (R)	2.06	2.2	13
25	Rules of Engagement	2.06	2.1	18

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: Glee (t-#18 in A18-49, #28 in True2), Castle (t-#23 in A18-49, #30 in True2) and How to Live (t-#23 in A18-49, #33 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!