Shout! Factory has announced that they will be releasing the complete WKRP In Cincinnati series on DVD, and rumor has it that it will be including the original music. I've been having trouble finding the original press release, and going to the product page of Shout! Factory's website (via a Google search -- the site's internal search returns nothing) displays a message stating that you must be registered to view the page. I registered and logged in, but the page still gave me the same message.
However, viewing the page via Google's cache, Shout! Factory describes the show as ""Pairing an impeccable ensemble cast with hilarious wit and popular tunes". In addition, the set is available for pre-order on Amazon, albeit without an expected release date.
You can view the cached version of Shout! Factory's WKRP product page here.
You can pre-order the set on Amazon here.
It's been quite awhile since I've written here. My schedule has been pretty hectic and I haven't had much time to post anything here. Of course, whenever someone from the world of television passes away, I want to try to find the time to post a tribute here, yet at the same time, I don't want this to become the "Classic TV World of Celebrity Deaths".
Over the past year, we've lost some of TV's greats, even though some of them weren't household names. Hal Sutherland of Filmation passed away in January, as did Lou Scheimer, also of Filmation, in October of 2013.
We lost Harold Ramis -- more famous for movies than television, but he made a huge impression in SCTV as both an actor and a writer -- back in February. And, most recently, Casey Kasem passed away last Sunday, June 15th.
One of my all-time favorite shows is WKRP in Cincinnati, a classic sitcom from the late '70s to early '80s about a low-rated radio station in Cincinnati and its trials and tribulations after switching from an easy listening format to rock and roll. This is very much a character-driven show, with much of the humor coming from the personalities and quirks of the characters themselves, rather than the situations they're placed in -- so maybe it's not so much a sitcom as it is a...I dunno, "charcom"?
The station is run by the well-meaning, but not so hard-working Arthur Carlson (Gordon Jump). His station's program director is Andy Travis (Gary Sandy), the man responsible for the change in format. Dr. Johhny Fever (Howard Hesseman) and Venus Flytrap (Tim Reid) are two of the station's disc jockeys, who occassionally butt heads with Les Nessman (Richard Sanders), WKRP's news directory with a penchant for farm stories, and Herb Tarlek (Frank Bonner), the station's sleazy salesman. Jennifer Marlowe (Loni Anderson) is Mr. Carlson's secretary, and Bailey Quarters (Jan Smithers) works in billing, and later, in the news department with Les. The cast is perfect in these roles, and the characters really are the heart of the show. WKRP always seems like it'd be a great place to work, even if it's unorganized and not very successful in its market.
I first saw this show in syndication as a kid, and loved it. I must've been channel surfing one day and came across it, or something I'd been watching ended and this came on afterwards, because I can't imagine how a show about a radio station would appeal to me when I was 7 or 8, or however old I was at the time. But I loved it.
This is one of those shows I have some good memories attached to. I remember one summer I spent a day at an amusement park with a friend, and later that evening being exhausted from the day's activities. I got a shower, then turned on the TV to find an episode of WKRP, and I remember laying there on the floor feeling tired, comfortable, and happy, watching that show. When I was older, after high school, I had a job where I would work most weekends so had some days off during the week, and on those weekdays, I'd get up, make some fried eggs and toast for breakfast, and watch reruns of WKRP on the small TV we had in the kitchen.
One of my all-time favorite episodes is "The Contest Nobody Could Win". Dr. Johnny Fever, one of the disc jockeys at the station, reads a promo for a station contest on the air but mistakenly reads the prize amount as $5,000 instead of $50.00, so they decide to make the contest so difficult that nobody could win. To this end, they splice together bits from 6 different songs, with each splice less than a second in length, and ask the listeners to identify each of the songs. But of course, things don't go quite as planned. Here's a clip from the episode, one of my favorite moments in the series:
Unfortunately, due to the high costs of music liscensing these days, this series isn't seen as often in syndication, and the only DVD release of the show (the first season) had the music in many scenes replaced with stock music, and where they couldn't do this, they cut footage entirely. In the aforementioned "Contest" episode, even the quick song snippets have been changed, and the voiceover of the caller naming them has been changed to a different actor, citing fictional song and artist names. The actor's delivery is different than in the original, and in my opinion, much less funny. Hopefully, some day they'll release the show with all the footage and music restored, even if it means a more expensive product. Another more recent series, Freaks And Geeks, had a similar issue with music, but they went to the trouble of securing all the rights and released the series uncut with the original music. Surely someone could take the time to do the same with WKRP, a series that ran four times as long and probably has more fans (no disrespect intended toward Freaks and Geeks, which is an awesome show too).
With it's character-driven comedy and a cast that really feels like a family (as cheesy as that sounds) WKRP is a classic.
UPDATE
Shortly after writing this post, I learned that the television network Antenna TV is currently airing WKRP, with at least some, and possibly all, of the original music intact. In fact, I'll be writing about Antenna TV in a later post.
My son and I are currently watching Cheers on Netflix. The whole thing started when he caught a few minutes of a Frasier episode one night -- he liked it, and ended up watching the whole series from start to finish (also courtesy of Netflix). At some point during all this, I mentioned Cheers to him and we watched a few episodes from the Kirstie Alley era. Eventually, we decided to sit through the whole series, which we're in the process of doing now.
This was another show I started watching in syndication. I haven't watched every episode, so a lot of the ones we've seen lately are new to me. I used to catch the show during weekdays in the evening, when one of our local stations would show it along with Night Court and Star Trek: The Next Generation.
There's something very "comfortable" about the show. Maybe it's the laid-back bar setting; maybe it's the fact that it's recorded in front of a live audience, and you can detect a slight echo from the soundstage; or maybe it's just the archetypal barfly characters that inhabit the stage. Regardless, this is a fun show to kick back and enjoy without having to put too much thought into it. Sometimes it's fun to watch a show that makes some sort of point, and sometimes it's fun to watch a show whose only point is finding a way to make you laugh.
I was surprised when we started going through these episodes that the older ones really didn't make me laugh as much as the later ones. Also, I was surprised by Sam's occasional mentions of the physical harm he wants to do to Diane when she makes him angry (he mentions wanting to smack her and bounce her off walls -- yikes!).
At certain points in the early seasons, the show almost becomes a soap opera, fixating too much (IMHO) on Sam and Diane's relationship. But when it's going down different paths it tends to be funnier (again, IMHO).
As for that place "where everybody knows your name", I was never much of a drinker and didn't tend to hang around bars, but I did have that sort of "everybody knows your name" hangout when I was in my late teens and early twenties: it was a pool hall. I started hanging out there after a friend of mine took me there one night, and I ended up meeting a lot of good friends there. On any given night, you were almost certain to find someone you knew there. We'd hang out, talk, play hackey-sack in the parking lot, loiter, play some games in the arcade, and just generally have a good time. We'd also occasionally shoot pool.
Anyway, Cheers makes my list (and I'm sure many other people's lists) of classic TV shows.
