Here's an interesting (to me, at least) article about Dick Cavett. Actually, there are two of them. Read this one and then read this one.
The first one, I think, makes the error of sounding like Cavett's late night show for ABC was all 90-minute interviews with Orson Welles and Katharine Hepburn. I was a pretty staunch follower and there were nights when his guest list was no more "intellectual" than Mr. Carson's opposite him. What's more, Cavett was pretty good at doing Johnny's kind of show…certainly better than Carson would have been at doing what we now come to think of as Cavett's.
I always felt that Cavett was sabotaged a bit by that "intellectual" label…and by the fact that this show was on (and was therefore promoted on) ABC when it had almost nothing else on its schedule that appealed to folks who wouldn't be scared off by that descriptor. And if the reaction of a few of my friends was typical, I think it wasn't that the show was too smart for them so much as that it had a lot of alien references. Someone was always citing an author they'd (or I'd) never heard of or mentioning a book we'd never read.
Also, there was the time slot. My father loved discussions of current events but one night when Cavett and his guests were debating the Vietnam War, the talk got my father so emotionally aroused that he couldn't sleep all night. If we'd had time-shifting DVRs back then, he'd have always watched Cavett — but a day or two later at an earlier hour. Since we didn't, he stopped watching most nights, opting for Johnny or other shows that were more soothing, pre-bedtime.
Despite all this, Cavett got fairly decent ratings — better for the most part than his predecessor in the time slot, Joey Bishop. The show was profitable with numbers that were probably about as good as anyone or anything was going to do against The Mighty Carson then. Sad to say, ABC decided a respectable second-place finish wasn't all that respectable. They began tampering, sticking Cavett into a dreadful rotation with other shows that had less appeal. Until they decided to hand the hour over to the news division, everything they stuck there did worse. TV often makes that error though, these days, not as often as it did then.
Nice to read that Mr. Cavett is serene, financially fine and still gloriously snide about all the things that one should be snide about. Follow his Twitter feed if you don't already. What he posts reads better if you can "hear it" with his delivery.