The True Top 25, Week Ending 10/13/13 (2013-14 Week Three)

Sunday Night Football, then The Big Bang Theory, then The Voice, then Modern Family. Surprise! Scandal held off an inflated Glee and the rest of the upper-2's gang to take the weekly broadcast drama crown.

With Super Fun Night dropping off the list, we're down to five new shows making the cut, with The Crazy Ones not that far from dropping out.

Perhaps the most notable thing about this list is that the bar to make the top 25 lowered by more than two tenths of a point from week two to week three, continuing broadcast's rather sharp negative momentum following the strong premiere week.

Rank	Name	True	A18-49	ARank
1	Sunday Night Football	7.64	8.4	1
2	The Big Bang Theory	5.31	5.1	2
3	The Voice Mon	4.58	4.6	3
4	Modern Family	3.67	3.9	4
5	How I Met Your Mother	3.19	3.0	7
6	Scandal	3.00	3.1	5
7	Sleepy Hollow	2.85	2.8	12
8	Glee	2.84	2.9	10
9	Grey's Anatomy	2.81	2.8	12
10	The Voice Tue	2.81	3.0	7
11	Agents of SHIELD	2.79	2.9	10
12	NCIS	2.70	2.8	12
13	The Blacklist	2.52	3.1	5
14	Survivor	2.45	2.5	17
15	2 Broke Girls	2.44	2.3	22
16	Once Upon a Time	2.39	2.4	19
17	The Millers	2.34	3.0	7
18	Criminal Minds	2.31	2.6	15
19	The Middle	2.28	2.2	24
20	Bones	2.21	2.1	26
21	NCIS: Los Angeles	2.18	2.6	15
22	ALCS (Sat)	2.18	1.9	33
23	The Crazy Ones	2.17	2.4	19
24	The X Factor Thu	2.15	2.0	30
25	The X Factor Wed	2.14	2.2	24

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: ALCS (Sun) (t-#19 in A18-49, #27 in True), Two and a Half Men (t-#22 in A18-49, #28 in True) and Super Fun Night (t-#17 in A18-49, #34 in True).

For more on the True Top 25, click to expand.

I created the True 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 the 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.