Show Business: ABC's Potpourri

For ten years, NBC'S Johnny Carson was the undisputed king of late-night television. During part of that time, CBS and ABC scarcely bothered to try to topple him from the peak of the Nielsen ratings. When they did, as in CBS'S venture with Merv Griffin in a Carson-style format, they flopped. CBS eventually gave up and last year opted for the sizable audience of insomniacs who want nothing more than to watch old movies. Now ABC thinks that it has found still a third audience with what it calls its Wide World of Entertainment.

Wide World is a rotating sequence of four...