The True Top 25, Week Ending 1/19/14 (2013-14 Week 17)

The penultimate game of the NFL season topped this week's True Top 25, while premiere week of American Idol topped the entertainment realm with The Big Bang Theory in repeats.

Five new shows made the cut this week including the first Voice-less episode of The Blacklist, bubble comedy Mom and a return engagement for Almost Human. Season highs from Shark Tank and 20/20 represented Friday, but there were a whooping six more Friday shows in the next 16 spots below the list (including Undercover Boss at #27).

Rank	Name	True	A18-49	ARank
1	NFC Championship Game	14.33	19.0	1
2	American Idol Wed	4.95	4.7	2
3	American Idol Thu	3.90	3.9	4
4	Modern Family	3.74	3.2	5
5	NCIS	3.09	3.0	6
6	The Big Bang Theory (R)	3.01	2.9	8
7	How I Met Your Mother	2.82	3.0	6
8	Criminal Minds	2.79	2.4	11
9	The Following	2.71	4.4	3
10	Shark Tank	2.64	2.1	18
11	The Blacklist	2.52	2.5	10
12	Agents of SHIELD	2.31	2.2	15
13	The Bachelor	2.23	2.3	14
14	2 Broke Girls	2.18	2.7	9
15	Sleepy Hollow	2.18	2.2	15
16	Mike and Molly	2.15	2.4	11
17	Mom	2.13	2.2	15
18	NCIS: Los Angeles	2.12	2.4	11
19	CSI	2.03	2.0	19
20	The Middle	2.02	1.8	25
21	Person of Interest	2.01	2.0	19
22	20/20	1.97	1.7	28
23	Chicago Fire	1.95	1.8	25
24	Castle	1.92	1.9	22
25	Almost Human	1.88	2.0	19

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: American Ninja Warrior (t-#22 in A18-49, #26 in True), The Goldbergs (t-#25 in A18-49, #33 in True) and The Millers (R) (t-#22 in A18-49, #35 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.