WKRP Episode: "The Baby"

Finally I can present the “missing” episode from the third season, where Mrs. Carlson has her baby. The version here was edited together from two tapes: the Comedy Network version, which was the cut syndication episode, and the E! version (sent to me by a kind collector) which includes scenes the syndicated version didn’t, while cutting others. This version still appears to be missing a few seconds, but it’s much more complete than the syndicated version.

In America’s Favorite Radio Station, Blake Hunter explains how this episode came about and why it's very different in style and structure from most other episodes. (This is one reason why I value WKRP in Cincinnati so much; it did many different kinds of episodes.) Having already written the episode where Mrs. Carlson gets pregnant, he had to write a follow-up where she has the baby, but:

We couldn't find anything that was fresh. And Hugh [Wilson] was wonderful for looking for fresh new ways of expressing himself. We couldn't find anything, so what we ended up doing was sort of very realistic. Allyn Ann McLerie, who played Mrs. Carlson, did a very realistic thing... I mean, the camera was on her as she was supposedly having the baby.

There was a hospital show that had just been canceled -- a soap, or something -- so we got to use their set. We went into a hospital, and we went up and down the halls and visited other people in other rooms, and it was kind of fun -- I enjoyed that. It was different. We didn't do it with an audience.

Apart from the basic, deliberately unsensational story of Carmen having the baby and Mr. Carlson getting cold feet about being in the operating room with her, the episode is a series of little vignettes about hospital life: the P.A. announcer call for the rich doctors to call their contractors and stockbrokers, the receptionist sends everyone along a maze of lines on the floor (providing actual directions only to hot women), and Johnny meets a lonely old woman and talks to her about the joys of death.

Also in the book, Hesseman explans his view of the bit where Fever puts the gas mask over his mouth:

Quite privately -- I didn't even share this with Hugh -- I just figured that Fever was the kind of a person who basically wecomed any and all opportunities to somehow introduce foreign substances into his body. It was just a habit. I just felt that Fever was not carried away by it, not ruled by it, but that he never ruled it out as an option in a situation, either.

I don't know what music is used in this episode, except for Johnny's rendition of "Peggy Sue." (Weirdly, in the "redubbed" version, Johnny was dubbed over by someone else singing... "Easter Parade." Which is also a copyrighted song. Maybe the re-dubbers didn't know it was copyrighted.) One of my favorite throwaway jokes is "the Mike Wallace School of Broadcasting, not affiliated with the guy on 60 Minutes."


WKRP s03e04 The Baby by carpalton