The True Top 25, Week Ending 4/7/13 (2012-13 Week 28)

A Saturday basketball game topped the True Top 25 for the second straight week, and this time the game was also a solid #1 in raw numbers. Leading sitcoms The Big Bang Theory, Modern Family and Two and a Half Men all had significant week-to-week upticks, and in Men's case this was considered the show's most impressive performance of the season. The premiere of How to Live joined usual newbie list-makers The Following and Elementary.

It was a huge week for Friday programming as Shark Tank made it back into the raw numbers top 25 and Undercover Boss easily made the True2 list. Those two shows along with Grimm (26th in True2), 20/20 (27th) and Blue Bloods (33rd) all had season highs in this metric, posting better-than-usual results against the late season viewing levels.

Rank	Name	True2	A18-49	ARank
1	NCAA Basketball	7.33	5.7	1
2	The Big Bang Theory	6.05	5.2	2
3	The Voice Mon	4.66	4.7	3
4	The Voice Tue	4.62	4.5	4
5	Modern Family	4.33	4.2	6
6	Two and a Half Men	3.99	3.9	7
7	Academy of Country Music Awards	3.63	4.3	5
8	American Idol Thu	3.59	2.9	9
9	Grey's Anatomy	3.28	2.8	11
10	American Idol Wed	3.22	3.1	8
11	Scandal	2.86	2.6	14
12	Shark Tank	2.86	2.1	21
13	Criminal Minds	2.84	2.8	11
14	Person of Interest	2.75	2.7	13
15	Survivor	2.65	2.5	15
16	How to Live	2.52	2.9	9
17	Undercover Boss	2.44	1.7	31
18	The Following	2.40	2.2	17
19	Elementary	2.35	2.1	21
20	Dancing with the Stars Mon	2.35	2.2	17
21	The Middle	2.29	2.0	24
22	Dancing with the Stars Tue	2.23	2.3	16
23	Hell's Kitchen	2.21	2.0	24
24	The Office	2.21	1.8	28
25	Castle	2.18	2.2	17

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: New Girl (t-#24 in A18-49, #28 in True2), Bones (t-#24 in A18-49, #29 in True2), CSI (t-#21 in A18-49, #32 in True2) and Revolution (t-#17 in A18-49, #42 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!