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ABC's rating since the season began in September is 21.1, CBS's is 18.7 and NBC's is 17.7. Translated into numbers, the figures indicate that ABC is watched by an average of 31 million people over the entire nighttime schedule, 3 million more than turn on CBS and 4 million more than look at NBC. Translated into dollars, a language TV folk feel even more comfortable speaking, each rating point in prime time is worth about $30 million in pretax profits over the course of the TV year. On the bottom line, it means, if the figures hold, that ABC will ring up about $72 million more than CBS this year, and $102 million more than NBC.
To outsiders, broadcasting has always looked a little crazy. But this year it really is crazy, and the February sweeps have blown down Network Row like Hurricane Agnes. Robert Wood, a former CBS president turned producer (The Cheap Show), refers to them as "the goddamn sweeps." He complains that "there shouldn't be such weeks in the TV calendar. They are artificial and destructive, and they contribute to the general feeling of paranoia." Like most other pernicious institutions, the sweeps still perform a function. Using two relatively small samples, Nielsen keeps regular tabs on how well the networks are doing. Some 1,200 families have the famous Nielsen meters attached to their sets to show which channel is being watched; 2,300 other families fill in diaries that tell not only what program is on but also who in the family is watching it. The results are available weekly, and many newspapers now ritually report the top ten shows.
This small survey does not tell how all of the country's 727 commercial stations are doing, however. For that information, which advertisers demand, the two rating services select hundreds of thousands of families, a combined total of more than 400,000 in February alone, and send them diaries. To cut costs, it was decided that instead of measuring daily, as Nielsen does for the networks, local ratings would be taken comprehensively during four months supposedly typical of their seasons: November, February, May, and three weeks in July. Based on how well they did in those periods, the stations would then decide how much to charge for each commercial minute.
Before long, of course, it occurred to stations that if they tried a little harder during those sweeps months, they would do better in the ratings and could make more money. But since the networks supply them with 22 hours of prime-time programming each week, it also occurred to them that the real effort had to come from their big brother in Manhattan. If a network is doing well, its affiliates also do well. If it is not, station owners become dyspeptic and surly and begin looking around for a bigger and better brother.
These days that bigger and better brother is ABC. Its great discovery was that kids control the dial, and that the channel turned on by a ten-year-old at 8 p.m. will often remain on through the 11 o'clock news. Hence, ABC hit upon a beginning lineup for the kids: Happy Days; Welcome Back, Kotter; Eight Is Enough and, this season, Mork & Mindy.