The True Top 25, Week Ending 8/11/13 (2012-13 Week 46)

It's our second of three True Top 25 check-ins this summer! We find ourselves with a clear elite tier, all of which tends to fall in the low-to-mid-2's (or mid-to-upper-2's in True2). It currently consists of Big Brother, America's Got Talent, MasterChef and Under the Dome. Then there's a huge drop-off to everything else doing mid-1's at best, led by shows like So You Think You Can Dance and American Ninja Warrior. Generally the only show that has occupied that nearly one-point gap in the middle has been The Bachelorette, which averaged a 1.98 for the season, but it got to look like an elite show this week on its finale night.

The ever-struggling repeat telecasts are as usual led by The Big Bang Theory and its lead-out Two and a Half Men, with Shark Tank and the Fox cartoons pretty much making up the second tier of repeaters. (Though the toons were kicked out of their regular slots in this particular week by the Teen Choice Awards.) CBS' Monday 9:00 hour comedies have repeated OK, perhaps getting a little help from some Under the Dome pre-tune. There are really no strong drama repeaters left; only CSI even went above a 1.0 demo last week. It was much-publicized that Breaking Bad (2.9) beat all the broadcasters this week, but another crazy stat was that the 8:00 repeat of last season's finale (1.2) beat all the broadcast drama repeats!

Rank	Name	True2	A18-49	ARank
1	Big Brother Thu	3.07	2.4	6
2	America's Got Talent Wed	3.00	2.5	3
3	America's Got Talent Tue	2.94	2.5	3
4	The Bachelorette	2.83	2.6	1
5	MasterChef	2.76	2.2	8
6	Under the Dome	2.71	2.6	1
7	Big Brother Sun	2.63	2.4	6
8	Big Brother Wed	2.61	2.2	8
9	The Bachelorette (Final Rose)	2.33	2.5	3
10	The Big Bang Theory (SR)	2.05	1.6	10
11	Two and a Half Men (SR)	2.01	1.5	11
12	America's Got Talent (R)	1.81	1.5	11
13	Dateline Fri (SR)	1.81	1.3	15
14	Shark Tank (SR)	1.72	1.2	19
15	So You Think You Can Dance	1.64	1.4	13
16	2 Broke Girls (SR)	1.60	1.3	15
17	American Ninja Warrior	1.59	1.4	13
18	Mike and Molly (SR)	1.56	1.3	15
19	Get Out Alive	1.49	1.3	15
20	60 Minutes (SR)	1.45	1.2	19
21	CSI (SR)	1.44	1.1	22
22	Hollywood Game Night	1.42	1.1	22
23	Extreme Weight Loss	1.41	1.2	19
24	Family Guy (SR)	1.36	1.0	31
25	Secret Millionaire	1.35	1.1	22

Originals missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: Whodunnit? (t-#22 in A18-49, #35 in True2), Camp (t-#22 in A18-49, #43 in True2) and Unforgettable (t-#22 in A18-49, #51 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.