The True Top 25, Week Ending 4/20/14 (2013-14 Week 30)

ABC's parting with Scandal for the summer, but at least it went out on top in the week 30 True Top 25, tying Monday's The Voice in raw rating and inching ahead based on timeslot difficulty. Usual chart-toppers The Big Bang Theory and Modern Family assisted in the Scandal victory by taking the week off, but their repeats still made the list in a generally slow week.

Rank	Name	True	A18-49	ARank
1	Scandal	3.65	3.4	1
2	The Voice Mon	3.50	3.4	1
3	The Voice Tue	3.44	3.0	3
4	Grey's Anatomy	3.13	2.6	5
5	The Big Bang Theory (R-8:30)	2.97	2.7	4
6	The Big Bang Theory (R-8:00)	2.88	2.2	9
7	Survivor	2.85	2.3	6
8	NCIS	2.58	2.2	9
9	2 Broke Girls	2.56	2.3	6
10	Shark Tank	2.44	1.7	21
11	Dancing with the Stars	2.44	2.3	6
12	Agents of SHIELD	2.38	2.1	11
13	American Idol Thu	2.35	1.9	14
14	20/20	2.31	1.8	17
15	American Idol Wed	2.26	1.9	14
16	Mike and Molly	2.24	2.1	11
17	Hell's Kitchen	2.14	1.7	21
18	The Amazing Race	2.13	1.7	21
19	Once Upon a Time	2.10	1.7	21
20	NCIS: Los Angeles	2.08	2.1	11
21	Person of Interest	1.96	1.8	17
22	Modern Family (R)	1.94	1.6	26
23	Chicago Fire	1.94	1.7	21
24	Last Man Standing	1.84	1.2	41
25	Mom	1.80	1.9	14

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: Friends with Better Lives (t-#17 in A18-49, #28 in True) and About a Boy (t-#17 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.