Radio: Beddy-Bye

Americans are said to be lonely people, and they are loneliest of all in the late watches of the night—when the inebriate becomes sentimental, the salesman paces his hotel room, the insomniac looks through his medicine cabinet. Radio fills the lonely time with all-night music, but television has moved more uncertainly. It has the brash irrelevancies of Steve Allen, the late late movies, the fast-talking pitchman promising a better, lanolin-coated world for $1 down and $1 a week.

To cut itself a bigger slice of this audience, Manhattan's WRCA-TV, flagship of the NBC network,...