The True Top 25, Week Ending 4/6/14 (2013-14 Week 28)

The Big Bang Theory took a very rare turn with a demo rating behind another demo program: the series finale of fellow CBS comedy How I Met Your Mother. But Big Bang is still #1 in True, and in fact by a fairly wide margin, because it was confined to only the lowest-viewed half hour on a much lower-viewed night. It seems kinda like the viewership estimate went up a little more on Monday than it "should" have, but maybe most of HIMYM's finale spike came from viewers not usually watching other TV.

With almost all big four series in originals, there were four new shows on the list this week. That's a pretty healthy number, but the raw numbers top 25 would actually include a whooping seven newbies. Friends with Better Lives, About a Boy and to a lesser extent Resurrection (just a single hundredth out of the True Top 25) were all nicked enough by the formula to drop out of this list.

Rank	Name	True	A18-49	ARank
1	The Big Bang Theory	5.93	4.9	2
2	How I Met Your Mother	5.26	5.4	1
3	Modern Family	3.80	3.3	4
4	The Voice Tue	3.62	3.1	6
5	The Voice Mon	3.43	3.4	3
6	Scandal	3.26	2.9	7
7	Academy of Country Music Awards	3.25	3.3	4
8	Grey's Anatomy	3.04	2.7	10
9	NCIS	2.85	2.4	14
10	Shark Tank	2.69	2.0	23
11	Criminal Minds	2.67	2.6	11
12	The Millers	2.61	2.8	8
13	The Blacklist	2.52	2.8	8
14	Survivor	2.47	2.3	17
15	Two and a Half Men	2.46	2.5	13
16	NCIS: Los Angeles	2.43	2.4	14
17	Once Upon a Time	2.43	2.4	14
18	Agents of SHIELD	2.40	2.0	23
19	Dancing with the Stars	2.39	2.3	17
20	American Idol Wed	2.31	2.1	22
21	The Middle	2.30	2.0	23
22	Hell's Kitchen	2.29	1.8	29
23	Family Guy	2.24	2.3	17
24	Mom	2.15	2.2	20
25	American Idol Thu	2.07	1.7	31

Missing the True Top 25 but in the A18-49 list: Resurrection (t-#20 in A18-49, #26 in True), Friends with Better Lives (t-#11 in A18-49, #35 in True) and About a Boy (t-#23 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.