Wednesday, May 1, 2013

The True Top 25, Week Ending 4/28/13 (2012-13 Week 31)


May sweeps are here, and The Big Bang Theory reclaimed the top position in the True Top 25. Its numbers were depressed a bit on NFL Draft night, so it lost the raw number crown to Monday's The Voice. The Following and Elementary remained the only reliable list-makers among the new crop, while Shark Tank, Undercover Boss and Fox's Saturday NASCAR all represented the weekend crowd.

A few shows have caught some notable late-season fire; Survivor hit a season high in both raw numbers and True2, Scandal tied its series high in raw numbers and exploded again in a True sense*, and Shark Tank again cracked the raw ratings top 25 and found yet another True2 high (pulling a 2.0 on a Friday with a measly 0.6 lead-in!).

*- I've noted this on the daily threads, but to reiterate: as last year, I applied the combined ESPN/NFLN ratings for the NFL Draft as cable competition on Thursday and Friday. While this does a very good job of "normalizing" shows like the CBS/NBC Thursday lineups, it probably serves to inflate the ABC/Fox True scores somewhat. In Scandal's case, beyond not being affected quite as much by the Draft, it's also a pretty safe bet that the Draft's combined rating was noticeably less than 3.6 by the 10:00 hour.

Rank Name True2 A18-49 ARank
1The Big Bang Theory5.834.52
2The Voice Mon4.824.91
3The Voice Tue4.244.13
4American Idol Thu3.782.86
5American Idol Wed3.553.34
6Survivor3.312.95
7Scandal3.302.86
8Grey's Anatomy3.282.710
9Two and a Half Men3.182.86
10NCIS3.012.86
11Shark Tank2.932.019
12Person of Interest2.662.413
13Family Guy2.492.612
14The Following2.472.413
15Elementary2.432.019
16NCIS: Los Angeles2.402.710
17Undercover Boss2.371.730
18The Amazing Race2.322.413
19Dancing with the Stars Mon2.242.117
20Bones2.202.019
21The Office2.201.730
22NASCAR2.201.540
23Hell's Kitchen2.192.019
24Castle2.152.316
25Law and Order: SVU2.121.926

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: Dancing with the Stars Tue (t-#19 in A18-49, #26 in True2), The Simpsons (t-#17 in A18-49, #27 in True2), Once Upon a Time (t-#19 in A18-49, #30 in True2) and Revolution (t-#19 in A18-49, #61 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!

2 comments:

Spot said...

Why is Once Upon a Time's True strength always so low? It's not like its competition is nothing, as it goes up against the second and third highest-rated programs of the night on broadcast. Also, it gets +150% retention out of AFHV! I know its ratings have been down as a whole (thanks to the fact that DST hits it particularly hard, as with many 8 pm family shows), but I don't get why its True score is below its A18-49.

Spot said...

Basically it's because the HUT levels are higher on Sunday than any other day, but the broadcast viewing is pretty low. This off-season I am going to work on coming up with a way to account for all the Sunday cable competition.

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