The True Top 25, Week Ending 3/30/14 (2013-14 Week 27)

Modern Family was back in business this week and continues to show a little more muscle than usual in the second half of the season. Though it held off The Voice (whose Monday edition was a tick higher in raw numbers) for the True entertainment crown this week, it was denied #1 among everything by CBS' NCAA basketball coverage. The late game on Friday scored a huge 3.6 demo. The penultimate How I Met Your Mother was back in the top 5, passing last week's scripted champ Scandal (which was also up), and it will be interesting to see if its finale can pass the return of The Big Bang Theory in week 28. (TBBT will be very hard-pressed to match the 5.4 raw rating, but it will probably get a more favorable Sitch since Thursday is usually lower-viewed than Monday.)

Shark Tank was off, but Friday still got plenty of representation on this list from the two basketball games and a season high Dateline. (Last Man Standing, hitting a True season high with an impressive 1.4 on a post-DST Friday, was just a few hundreths off of the list.) The Blacklist and Resurrection were the only new shows this week as usual suspects Agents of SHIELD and The Millers sat out again.

Rank	Name	True	A18-49	ARank
1	NCAA Basketball (Fri-Late)	4.58	3.6	2
2	Modern Family	3.89	3.6	2
3	The Voice Mon	3.80	3.7	1
4	The Voice Tue	3.72	3.4	5
5	How I Met Your Mother	3.70	3.5	4
6	Scandal	3.57	3.1	6
7	NCAA Basketball (Thu-Late)	3.19	2.6	9
8	NCAA Basketball (Fri-Early)	3.17	2.3	14
9	Grey's Anatomy	3.03	2.6	9
10	NCIS	2.80	2.5	11
11	Survivor	2.66	2.3	14
12	American Idol Wed	2.46	2.2	18
13	NCIS: Los Angeles	2.46	2.4	12
14	Dancing with the Stars	2.46	2.3	14
15	The Blacklist	2.42	2.8	7
16	NCAA Basketball (Thu-Early)	2.35	2.0	21
17	The Middle	2.31	1.9	26
18	2 Broke Girls	2.26	2.3	14
19	Hell's Kitchen	2.21	1.9	26
20	American Idol Thu	2.18	1.9	26
21	Resurrection	2.18	2.4	12
22	Mike and Molly	2.12	2.0	21
23	Once Upon a Time	2.05	2.1	19
24	Dateline Fri	2.03	1.5	35
25	Person of Interest	2.02	2.0	21

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: Family Guy (t-#19 in A18-49, #27 in True), basketball-fueled 60 Minutes (t-#7 in A18-49, #29 in True), About a Boy (t-#21 in A18-49, #38 in True) and The Amazing Race (t-#21 in A18-49, #39 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.