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Commercially, the show is sold out well in advance, and its annual network billings of $20 million enable Tonight to gross more than any other entertainment program on television. It is not only the size of the audience that attracts Carson's advertisers, but its quality as well. His viewers are mostly urban and at least high-school-educated—young enough to stay up late with ease, or successful enough not to have to show up too early for work. Jimmy Stewart watches, and so do Bobby Kennedy, Ed Sullivan, Darryl Zanuck, New York's Mayor John Lindsay, Nebraska Governor Norbert Tiemann, Robert Merrill and Nelson Rockefeller. Rocky was Carson's guest recently and suggested that Johnny run against Bobby for the Senate in 1970. There was much good-natured kidding, and the next night Carson was still playing the gag. "I have no intention of running for public office," he said. "As I was telling my wife Joanne Bird. . ."
Nielsen Quaver. Carson's dominance of nighttime television gave him the clout to beat NBC into a big raise after the recent AFTRA strike. Previously, he was getting about $15,000 for doing five times a week what Dean Martin does once for $40,000, and he was paying his own staff, to boot. Johnny's new contract gives him fuller control of the show. NBC now pays the extras and gave Carson a raise to about $20,000 a week, bringing his annual TV income to more than $1,000,000.
Carson had NBC at his mercy, of course. Thanks to his popularity, the network is dominant in the late-night time slot, but the other networks and independent challengers were moving in to get a piece of the action. CBS, whose affiliates generally run movies opposite Carson, tried to buy him away from NBC, but as Johnny put it, "I would feel as out of place on another network as Lurleen Wallace giving a half-time pep talk to the Harlem Globetrotters."
Meanwhile, ABC signed Nightclub Comic Joey Bishop as host of a copycat show opposite Tonight, but Bishop is being clobbered in the ratings by nearly 3 to 1. The even newer syndicated Las Vegas Show with Bill Dana scarcely excites a quaver on the Nielsen meters. Westinghouse Broadcasting Co. has two talk-variety entries—Mike Douglas in 142 cities, Merv Griffin in 90. But Carson is considered so formidable that Griffin opposes him head-on in only one market, New York City, while Douglas is programmed nowhere after 6 p.m.
Sporadic Specials. All this late-night TV activity, says Actor Tony Randall, a frequent Carson guest, is a response to "an unwritten law that says people must be entertained 24 hours a day and must have a choice of six channels all the time." If that's a law, there are a lot of people who don't obey it. But latest studies show that the average TV set burns more than six hours a day, and that the average viewer spends more than three hours before the tube. This helps to explain why TV advertising has grown to $3 billion a year in billings and why the nation's TV stations earned about 30% profit before taxes in 1965, the last year tabulated by the FCC.
Any similarity between those outsized statistics and quality programming is, of course, incidental. The