[LINK] "WKRP In Perpetuity"

[rfmcdonald]

Michaelangelo Matos' post at NPR's The Record blog about the prescience and the importance of WKRP in Cincinnati, a classic TV comedy recently re-released with its original music soundtrack intact, gets the show's importance.

Nobody expected high realism from a network sitcom, but producer Hugh Wilson had sold advertising on an Atlanta Top 40 station before moving into television, and beyond basing several plots on true stories from his time in the trenches (most famously "Turkeys Away," from season one, in which the station foolishly drops live turkeys on a parking-lot crowd from a helicopter), he insisted on a surprising amount of truthfulness about the way the radio biz worked.

By the second season, Travis is testily insisting that Fever "play the hits," a refrain that lasted the rest of the series' run. In season four's "The Consultant," a slick programming expert scoffs at Fever's unreconstructed freeform DJ style, telling Travis, "He's stuck in 1962 ... Your format is all over the road ... Nobody is programming their own music anymore." Even Travis's moldy speech at the end of season one's "Hoodlum Rock," about a fictional British band, Scum (played by the real group Detective, featuring Michael Des Barres), who are allegedly punk but sounds like Foreigner, complete with cornball saxophone break, features Travis musing, "Whatever happened to groups like Crosby, Stills & Nash, or Chicago?" in precisely the way a rock-radio lifer of the time would have done. On multiple episodes, the station's staff fights to get their hands on the Arbitron book.

"Johnny Comes Back," another first-season episode, tackles payola — a new WKRP DJ is found out after taking a cocaine payoff from a label rep. (Fever, who figures it out, tells the station's well-meaning dumbbell boss, Arthur Carlson — Gordon Jump — that it's "foot powder"; naturally, Carlson uses it for just that. "I've lost all feeling in my foot," he yelps. "I've got a monkey on my foot.") "In Concert," from season two, handles a real-life incident — The Who's Riverfront Stadium concert on December 3, 1979, in which the crowd, most of which had general-admission, "festival seating" tickets, rushed in the doors, with 11 fans dying in the crush — with real gravity; it's one of the series' finest episodes.

While WKRP in Cincinnati's breakout star was Loni Anderson, as station receptionist Jennifer Marlowe, a blonde bombshell who's also the smartest person in the room, Dr. Johnny Fever is the show's most resonant character, particularly at a remove of 35 years. Hesseman's walrus mustache, motorcycle shades, and is-he-or-isn't-he-stoned? demeanor made him prime time's first full-on Sixties burnout. (Meathead was a grad student.) Moreover, Fever's hippie-era idealism is seldom the butt of the joke. In "Pills," from season four, the station takes, then refuses advertising from a sleazy seller of diet pills — over-the-counter amphetamines, as Fever gleans from the wording of his spot — with Fever noting, "I thought since the Republicans took office everyone just took downers."