Friday, April 03, 2009

WKRP Episode: "Never Leave Me, Lucille"

This season 1 episode, where Herb breaks up with his wife Lucille (I'm not spoiling anything when I say everything's back to status quo by the end) was the 19th in production order, the 12th in airing order. I've always thought of this as one of the episodes where WKRP in Cincinnati really came together. Not that there weren't great episodes before this one, but here nearly all the characters have become what they're going to be for the rest of the series, both by themselves and in terms of their relationships with one another.

The episode has two musical sequences, both of which were eliminated on the DVD: "Heartbreak Hotel" (sung by Les); "Everybody Rock n' Roll the Place" by Eddie Money.

Cold Open and Act 1





Act 2





2 comments:

Mike said...

Granted, Bailey looks good all the time, but it's especially true in this episode. Too bad she wasn't in more of it.

Out of curiosity, after I watched this I watched the Hulu version of it, to see how they handled the music cuts. Interestingly, while they kept the bit with Johnny throwing darts at the Barry Manilow picture (and just played some generic rock instrumental, which made it a little silly when you saw Johnny mouthing to the words), they totally snipped the part where Venus comes in and tells Johnny he wants his $15. Instead, it cuts straight from the dart-throwing to Jennifer walking in. I don't really know why they cut it; yes, there was still music, but it had been turned down by that point, and besides, they were already using a generic instrumental anyway. They left the rest of the scene intact, so you know Johnny owes Venus money, but you don't know how much or what for. (Plus, by trimming the part where Venus comes in, you go from Johnny alone in the booth to Venus all of a sudden just appearing there.)

Jaime J. Weinman said...

The reason they cut that bit was that there are no separate music and dialogue tracks. If they cut the music, they have to cut the dialogue that's spoken over the music. Hence a lot of the brutal cuts on the DVD/Hulu, where they cut entire scenes, or parts of scenes, where dialogue was spoken over music.