Racing for Midnight

For nearly ten years NBC's Johnny Carson has monopolized TV's late hours with his facile, funny and cool show-biz chatter. ABC hoped to cut into his audience with Dick Cavett and a more intellectual approach. CBS aimed to bring him down with that old Beverly Hillbilly Merv Griffin. But neither even approached his ratings, and Carson remained undisputed king of the insomniacs. No longer. Since CBS replaced Griffin with a lineup of late movies twelve weeks ago, Carson, for the first time in a decade, has found himself in a ratings race.

It is a race he often loses. Since the movies began, they have topped Carson's ratings seven out of nine times, although in the latest Nielsen report, Carson averaged a 32.5% share of the viewing audience v. CBS's 31%. (CBS's Griffin, by contrast, had drawn around 16% of the late watchers and ABC's Cavett has drawn about 13%.)

NBC argues--and has the figures to prove it--that though Carson's share of the audience has gone down, his total number of viewers has remained constant. CBS, it contends, has grabbed a whole new audience of diehard film buffs that was not watching the talk shows. Still, the film phenomenon must give pause to Carson, who last week moved his show from New York to Los Angeles, hoping, among other things, that he will be able to attract more show business guests on the West Coast. What makes it all the worse is that Carson's competition comes mostly from B-grade flicks.

The other talk shows are having problems as well--and not just from the late movie. It was announced last week that David Frost's syndicated talk show would die at the end of June, and ABC has warned Dick Cavett that unless his ratings are improved in the next three months, the show would be dropped in the fall. Cavett counters that ABC has been "lazy, inept and incompetent" in promoting his show. What would take his place? ABC talks grandly of a "major program development effort" to find something new. So long as its ratings keep up, CBS will be happy with its own "development effort"--dusting off cans of old movies.

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