Friday, July 18, 2008

WKRP Episode: "Most Improved Station"

With this, the last episode of season 2, it looks like I have posted every episode from WKRP in Cincinnati's second season (complete and with nearly all the music). This episode was written by Richard Sanders (Les) and his writing partner, actor Michael Fairman. They wrote five episodes for the series, including two of the best-loved episodes from the first season ("A Date With Jennifer" and the Ferryman Funeral Home episode).

In this episode, morale is low at the station after they lose a "Most Improved Station" award, and Mr. Carlson calls a meeting where the employees (well, eight of them -- why is it that Johnny and Venus are the only disc jockeys who ever show up at these meetings?) try to work things out. Frank Bonner once hinted that the episode was tweaking the real-life fights and resentment that sometimes went on, but like any good workplace comedy, it applies to any place where people get on each other's nerves from working together every day.

There's only one bit of music in this episode and I don't know what song it is.









I'll keep this up for as long as I can, though there are a few episodes I still don't have complete, and the first season episodes can't be posted as Fox blocks them from being uploaded. (Fox has the butchered DVD versions of the first season at hulu.com, and they've blocked all uploads of anything from the first season, even the scenes that they cut out like the Pink Floyd scene.)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ken Levine mentions the WKRP music rights issue in a post today on a similar problem with a Season 9 episode of "Cheers"

Stacia said...

There are mentions of other DJs in the show, and don't we see one once? In the first season I swear we see the daytime DJ come in and say something to Johnny. Unfortunately I haven't dubbed all my VHS copies of the show onto DVD, so I can't refer to my own collection to find out.

Also, I wanted to ask you a question. Back in the mid-1980s, our local station WIBW stopped showing WKRP reruns, so I wrote the station asking to bring the show back. I got a lovely letter from the station manager (I was a kid, and kids get nice answers to their letters). In his explanation he referred to the fact that WKRP had something like 7 episodes which never made it to syndication. Do you happen to know if those episodes ever DID get into syndication?

Anyway, I thought I'd ask, and wanted to say "Hi!" as well.

Anonymous said...

Good Job! :)