The True Top 25, Week Ending 12/8/13 (2013-14 Week Eleven)

Sunday Night Football won another True Top 25, and a huge Big Ten Championship Game put the pigskin in the #2 slot as well for a second straight week. Next was top entertainment series draw The Big Bang Theory, and rounding out a very strong top four was NBC's breakthrough special The Sound of Music Live! The drama race narrowly went to Scandal in a very good week for both of the top two draws; Scandal was up a tick even with the NBC competition over three points stronger than usual from SOML, while The Blacklist's fall finale grew by two tenths over its normal level.

With a few of the top newbies sitting out, only two made the cut this week; we seem to be at a point where one of the three new CBS comedies sneaks on every week, and this time it was The Crazy Ones' turn (for the first time since week three). Shark Tank was the lone Friday representative as usual, but it just barely made it thanks to irregularly high viewing estimates on Friday.

Rank	Name	True	A18-49	ARank
1	Sunday Night Football	6.50	6.9	1
2	Big Ten Championship	5.02	4.5	4
3	The Big Bang Theory	4.70	4.8	2
4	The Sound of Music Live!	4.67	4.6	3
5	The Voice Mon	3.41	3.4	5
6	Modern Family	3.32	3.2	7
7	How I Met Your Mother	3.31	3.0	10
8	Scandal	3.24	3.0	10
9	The Blacklist	3.20	3.2	7
10	The Voice Tue	3.14	3.4	5
11	Saturday Night Live Christmas	2.67	2.6	14
12	Survivor	2.64	2.6	14
13	Grey's Anatomy	2.59	2.3	18
14	Family Guy	2.55	2.7	12
15	2 Broke Girls	2.47	2.7	12
16	Christmas in Rockefeller Center	2.35	2.3	18
17	Two and a Half Men	2.35	2.3	18
18	The Simpsons	2.31	3.1	9
19	Mike and Molly	2.22	2.4	16
20	Saturday Night Football	2.03	1.7	35
21	A Charlie Brown Christmas	2.02	1.9	31
22	The Crazy Ones	2.01	2.1	22
23	Chicago Fire	2.01	2.3	18
24	Once Upon a Time	2.00	2.1	22
25	Shark Tank	2.00	2.0	29

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: The Amazing Race (t-#22 in A18-49, #28 in True), Mom (t-#22 in A18-49, #29 in True), American Dad! (t-#22 in A18-49, #30 in True), The Biggest Loser (t-#22 in A18-49, #31 in True), The Millers (t-#16 in A18-49, #33 in True) and Bob's Burgers (t-#22 in A18-49, #41 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.