WKRP in Cincinnati – premiers September 18, 1978

WKRP in Cincinnati — which ran on CBS from its premier September 18, 1978 to 1982 — was the first American prime time television show to take rock seriously as a subject. ( Yea, we are a day late)

Set at a last-place AM radio station that hires programming director Andy Travis (Gary Sandy) who switches its format from “beautiful music,” aimed at senior citizens, to rock, WKRP in Cincinnati disappeared from syndication once the licensing fees ran out for the many original recordings it utilized — everything from Ted Nugent’s “Queen of the Forest” (the first song the station plays under the new format) to Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” (from the series’ finale).

~~The Doctor Is In~~

By the time WKRP in Cincinnati hit the air, freeform didn’t really exist in the commercial realm at all, and AOR was almost empty of black music. Calling WKRP simply a “rock and roll station” gave the show license for those two very different format styles to coexist without any seeming incongruity. (Putting WKRP on the AM dial — by that point no longer the place for just about any music station — helped the illusion.)

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

~~ Some of the Best of Johnny Fever ~~

“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.

Unlike many DJs from that era, Fever played punk as well as rock and soul; the range of music on the show gave this fictional radio station a better playlist than most of the era’s real ones. But although the show helped break Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” big, the exception, in Fever’s case, was disco. “I asked him to play one disco record and he threatened to throw himself in front of Donna Summer’s tour bus,” Travis complains in “Baby, If You’ve Ever Wondered,” from season two. In “Dr. Fever and Mr. Hyde,” from season three, Johnny, tapped to host a disco TV show, transforms into Rip Tide, a cynical sequin-suited schmoozer and the virtual double of the radio station’s smarmy ad salesman, Herb Tarlek (Frank Bonner). This, too, was relatively realistic, even if today it seems less than resonant. But who expects perfect foresight from a time capsule?

SOURCE: N.P.R..