The Jack Benny Program - Ending

Ending

In his unpublished autobiography, I Always Had Shoes (portions of which were later incorporated by Jack's daughter, Joan, into her memoir of her parents, Sunday Nights at Seven), Benny said that he, not NBC, made the decision to end his TV series in 1965. He said that while the ratings were still very good (he cited a figure of some 18,000,000 viewers per week, although he qualified that figure by saying he never believed the ratings services were doing anything more than guessing, no matter what they promised), advertisers [the alternate sponsors during his final season in 1964-65 were State Farm Insurance and Miles Laboratories (Alka-Seltzer, One-a-Day) were complaining that commercial time on his show was costing nearly twice as much as what they paid for most other shows, and he had grown tired of what was called the "rat race." Thus, after some three decades on radio and television in a weekly program, Jack Benny went out on top.