WKRP and Cincinnati
Who Knows Where Great TV Moments Can Come From
It lasted just 90 episodes over barely four seasons, at a time when sub-100 totals were deemed failures and runs of seven-plus years were the norm. Still, WKRP in Cincinnati, which aired on CBS from 1978 to 1982, made its mark.
An ensemble comedy set at a struggling radio station, WKRP was equal parts conventional and subversive, obvious and sly. At its best, its writing and performances made episodes soar where other better-rated or longer-lasting sitcoms merely flew.
One episode in particular, which aired in February 1980.
Its roots tie to today’s date.
On December 3, 1979, in the real-life Cincinnati, a crowd of General Admission (non-assigned-seating) ticket holders on line outside Riverfront Coliseum to see The Who — they’d been waiting in the cold for hours — rushed the arena’s doors pre-show in frantic attempts to secure the best viewing spots on the open stage floor. The rush became an asphyxiating stampede. Eleven people (average age: 19) were killed. Twenty-six others were inured.
It was one of the worst concert-related disasters in U.S. history.
The show went on as scheduled — The Who weren’t even aware of the incident until after the concert — but in the aftermath both the group and the city were in shock and mourning. Local officials hurried to address the tragedy by banning open-floor or festival seating. (Other cities and venues around the country soon followed.) The Who dedicated their next stop’s performance to the victims.
Also in the aftermath, a TV sitcom about a Cincinnati-based rock-music radio station used the Cincinnati-based rock-music tragedy as the storyline for what became one of its best-remembered shows.
Back in the 1970s, prime-time TV changed as the country did. The creatives behind the medium came to see that its reach could extend further than its previously self-limiting grasp. It could be more. Try more. Tell more. Do more. The black-and-white of its past took on shades of gray. One-hour dramas turned less-predictable. Made-for-TV movies tackled taboos. Half-hour comedies mined cold realities.
And WKRP set its creative sites on doing a sitcom episode about the deaths of eleven people.
Reports have varied through the years as to how the idea unfolded. Online accounts suggest that showrunner Hugh Wilson needed to be persuaded to take on the tragedy, but in a 2014 interview cast member Tim Reid quotes Wilson himself as saying after it happened: “We’re a radio station in Cincinnati. This happened there. We would have to do something about that.”
Whatever the roots, the Who episode, titled “In Concert,” came together quickly. It aired February 11, 1980, just 70 days after the real thing.
Directed by Linda Day and written by Steven Kampmann, the episode begins on the day of the concert, with WKRP offering free Who tickets as part of a call-in giveaway and with various staffers gearing up to attend the concert themselves. Then it focuses on the morning after, as they come to grip with the sad news of the day. Troubled the senselessness of it. By even their possible roles in it.
No one seems more bothered than station GM Arthur Carlson (Gordon Jump), senior member of the crew, who’d attended the night before with his young son. “I feel so shamed. We publicized that concert. Gave away tickets. I was there when it happened. Enjoying myself … You keep asking yourself why. Why something happens like this.”
It’s not a totally laughs-free outing: Early scenes in the episode find Carlson fighting a losing battle with a head-cold and station DJ Johnny Fever (Howard Hesseman) trying in vain to round up a date for the concert, going so far as to ask square-peg colleague Les Nessman (Richard Sanders) to accompany him. But 14 minutes in, the sitcom pivots to a stark and heavy story about grief being felt by an entire city.
(Reportedly, the vice-president of Cincinnati’s then CBS-affiliated station WCPO initially rejected the idea of airing the episode there. Too raw, too soon. But he and other local officials relented after viewing an advance copy. That it spotlit the festival-seating ban helped, as it apparently did with cast members during production of the episode, too, who said that shooting it made for an at-times difficult week.)
Threads about “long-time-in-coming” dangers of festival seating are woven into the staff discussion, but mostly the episode is just about the hours before and after a tragedy. A day in the life. And death. People talking. And feeling. Program Director Andy Travis (Gary Sandy), long the ringmaster for WKRP’s band of misfits, deftly assumes a role as counselor-in-chief. It ends with staff members leaving the station to join in a candlelight memorial at the city’s Fountain Square. A two-part on-screen message follows:
WKRP’s “In Concert” wasn’t the only episode of the series to turn serious or to make a social comment: In its four years it also dealt with alcoholism, spousal abuse, draft desertion, the educational system, sexuality, and the then-growing Moral Majority movement. In 1982 it even took on another (literal) front-page issue with an episode titled “Dear Liar,” inspired by the highly-publicized “Jimmy’s World” story published in The Washington Post in 1981 that won reporter Janet Cooke a Pulitzer Prize —a story that, as it turned out, she’d fabricated.
But it was the only episode that was ripped from horrific real-life headlines about its namesake city. Headlines about local deaths, even as the incident continued to percolate there. It did it with finesse and respect both for the victims and the city of Cincinnati. “There’s been a lot of talk about setting up a commission to look into what happened here,” says station manager Arthur Carlson near the end of the episode. “It’s not gonna be just talk. This town’s gonna do it. This is a good town. We’re responsible people here.”
And of course the town did do it.
(Sidenote: The ban was repealed in 2004 in an effort to attract more big-name acts.)
Despite multiple Best Comedy Emmy nominations, as well as Humanitas recognition and critical acclaim, WKRP in Cincinnati was treated pretty shabbily by CBS throughout its four-year-run. The network changed the show’s timeslot no fewer than 11 times. Ratings couldn't help but erode and lead to cancellation, which happened in the spring of 1982. Ironically, its last original episode in April was ranked in the Top Ten. Which is where it stayed that summer of 1982, too, the result of finally being left in one timeslot for viewers to make a regular habit.
Too little, too late. And too bad.
Fans of the show were left only to imagine what future seasons would have held given the talent in front of and behind the cameras, especially among the writers, who seemed to know how and when to zig where other series zagged. (The answers weren't to come in the mediocre and short-lived syndicated 1990s sequel, though: Despite the return of some original cast members and key behind-the-scene personnel, The New WKRP in Cincinnati is barely even acknowledged as existing among disciples of the real WKRP.)
Maybe WKRP in Cincinnati was just meant to have had the limited life it did. A comet that blazed brightly but briefly. Remembered more for how it lit up the sky than for how long.
The show does live on: Each November, among now second-generation fans, memories are invoked of its infamous 1978 holiday episode involving Thanksgiving birds dropped from a helicopter over the city as part of a promotion stunt and the legendary quote that followed:
“As god as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”
And WKRP lives on each December, too. A piece of history about history, representing the combined power of the words and images that make up the thing called television.
