YMMV / WKRP in Cincinnati

• Award Snub: The show got a handful of Emmy Award nominations in its run (including Outstanding Comedy Series in its final three seasons) but only won a third season Emmy for Video Editing. Amazingly, despite the strong cast, only Howard Hesseman and Loni Anderson (both going 0 for 2 in the Supporting category) got acting nominations.
• Awesome Music:
  • Original broadcasts would play honest-to-God rock and popular music. The show would use songs with meaningful lyrics to underscore the plots of each episode. Of course, most rebroadcasts or home video releases won't have the same songs... though as of 2016 Antenna TV is rerunning the episodes with the songs. They showed "Turkeys Away" with full Pink Floyd scene restored, and it was glorious.
    Carlson: Do I hear dogs barking on that thing?
    Johnny: I do.
  • The closing credits song, a hard rock number composed and performed by Jim Ellis, an Atlanta musician who recorded some of the incidental music for the show. According to people who attended the recording sessions, Ellis didn't yet have lyrics for the closing theme, so he sang nonsense words to give an idea of how it would sound. Hugh Wilson, however, decided to use the words anyway, since he felt that it would be funny to use lyrics that were deliberately gibberish, as a satire on the incomprehensibility of many rock songs. Also, Wilson noted that because CBS always had an announcer talking over the closing credits, and they would often fade the music down, most people couldn't hear the lyrics anyway.
• Breakout Character: Two secondary characters really captured a lot of the show's familiarity with fans: Johnny, the morning man with quite a few problems and some of the best quips in the show, and Les, the confused newsman with a big ego who gets some of the best scenes (including the big scene in Turkeys Away) in the whole show.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • The famous turkey drop scene. Dropping a live turkey from a helicopter to its death: unforgivable. Dropping dozens if not hundreds of turkeys from a helicopter onto the streets causing thousands of dollars worth of damages, the streets to be littered with turkey carcasses, and patrons running for safety because the idea man forgot turkeys are flightless birds: absolute gut buster.
  • Les's occasional uninformed and outdated comments regarding blacks towards Venus, including repeatedly referring to him as a Negro. In any other context and from anyone else, it would be racist and awful. From Les, who always treats Venus as an equal, genuinely thinks he's being friendly and supportive, and is shown repeatedly to be incredibly naive and innocent? Combined with Venus's bewildered reactions, they become outright hilarious.
• Fan-Preferred Cut Content: "Another Merry Mix-Up" and "Jennifer's Wedding", the two episodes that were never filmed due to Executive Meddling, have defenders who think that the early script drafts had some good jokes and that the episodes would have made plot twists in subsequent episodes come across more believably.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: In the US the show is a fondly-remembered Work Com with an avid cult following. In Canada it's a major TV comedy icon, dating all the way back to the first season, when it attracted huge audiences there even as it struggled in the ratings south of the border.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In the first few episodes, the theme tune was preceded by a fake news bulletin, where an announcer says, "...but the Senator, while insisting he was not intoxicated, could not explain his nudity." Weirdly, many years later Jan Smithers (Bailey) would get into a traffic accident while inexplicably — allegedly — driving in the nude.
  • Johnny's rant about the "phone cops" is a comedy classic, but the subtext—that "the phone company knows everything you do" is a lot less funny in light of the NSA's mass phone surveillance scandal.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In "Baby, If You've Ever Wondered", Travis laments that the best he did was cause the station to rise two ratings points rather than go straight to number one, and says that what he should have done was get rid of Herb, Les and Mr. Carlson himself, as none of them are good at their jobs and are dragging the station down. Who are the only three employees still there during The New WKRP in Cincinnati?
  • When Johnny meets his estranged daughter's boyfriend, he has them stay at his place, where they notice a picture of Johnny with Mick Jagger. The boyfriend thinks this is "far out" and suggests that Johnny "speak to Mick" about an audition for the Rolling Stones, because "Keith Richards can't last forever, am I right?" That was in 1980. As of 2022, not only is Richards still very much alive, but still touring with the Stones, despite looking like a walking corpse.
• Hollywood Homely: Many male fans "don't get" why Jan Smithers was cast as the "plain" foil to sexy Jennifer. What they don't get is that Bailey was actually supposed to be the sexy one - the hip, modern girl in comparison to Jennifer's old-fashioned 60s-era "sexy secretary". On the other hand, promoting Gary Sandy as the hunk when Tim Reid was in the cast can only be seen as a result of Most Writers Are Male.
• It Was His Sled: The fate of those turkeys.
  Jennifer (on the phone with a concerned citizen): Well sir, not a lot of turkeys survive Thanksgiving!
• Only the Creator Does It Right: Hugh Wilson was not involved in The New WKRP, which was widely looked down upon in comparison (Bill Dial, the writer of "Turkeys Away", was that program's showrunner, and the final product is seen as an extension of that episode).
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Howard Hesseman as Dr. Johnny Fever.
  • Tim Reid (Gordon "Venus Flytrap" Sims) is also best known for playing Lt. Marcel "Downtown" Brown on Simon & Simon, Frank Parrish in Frank's Place, Mike Hanlon in the It miniseries, and Ray Campbell on Sister, Sister.
  • George Gaynes directed the series finale, "Up and Down the Dial." Gaynes is best known for playing Henry Warnimont on Punky Brewster and Commandant Eric Lassard in Police Academy, the latter of which was coincidentally directed by Hugh Wilson. Amusingly, Gaynes' real life wife, Allyn Ann McLerie, had a recurring role on WKRP as Carmen Carlson, Mr. Carlson's wife.
  • Blake Hunter wrote 12 episodes. Hunter is best known as co-creator and co-executive producer of Who's the Boss?.
  • Dan Guntzelman and Steve Marshall wrote six episodes. Both are best known as creators and co-executive producers of Just the Ten of Us.
  • Steven Kampmann also wrote six episodes. Kampmann is best known for playing Kirk Devane on Newhart.
  • Max Wright was half a decade away from his breakout role as Willie Tanner on ALF, when he showed up on this show, in a couple of episodes, as Mr. Carlson's lawyer.
• Spiritual Successor: NewsRadio.
  • The show itself was also considered a Spiritual Successor to MTM's The Mary Tyler Moore Show; Grant Tinker called it "a radio station cousin to Mary's show," and critic Tom Shales called Gary Sandy "Gary Tyler Moore". The MAD parody WKRAP in Cincinati even ends with Mama Carlson firing all the station employees (including her son) and replacing them with the recently fired WJM staff.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: Most of the replacement music (for syndicated/DVD releases) sounds nothing like the original music. However, when a plot point or mood depends on a specific song (such as "Hot Blooded" in "A Date with Jennifer" or "Your Smiling Face" in "I Want to Keep My Baby"), a more obvious soundalike will be used.
• Vindicated by History: A middling successful TV show during its run, WKRP now regarded as one of the best Work Com shows ever.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Herb's relentless pursuit of Jennifer (and management's seeming tolerance of it) would likely result in a sexual harassment lawsuit nowadays. Andy actually refers to it as "sexual harassment" toward the end of the series.
    • Similarly, Les' insistence on referring to Venus and other black characters as "negroes" even after Venus corrects him would probably result in some kind of discrimination suit.
  • Bailey happens to walk in on a conversation between Les and Herb, the latter of whom has been kicked out by his wife. Herb has declared that he doesn't want to go back to her, and Les is trying to persuade him to do so. Bailey walks in just in time to hear Herb declare "Face it, Les, whatever we had, it's over!" To which Les says "You can't just throw away a beautiful relationship!" and Herb counters "You can't just base a relationship on sex!" while Bailey sinks into her chair, mortified. These days she would likely start off surprised that she didn't know they were "in a relationship", but would then join in on trying to convince Herb to "go back to Les," or just mind her own business if she regarded the issue as personal.
  • On a related note, when Les is Mistaken for Gay it nearly destroys his professional reputation (such as it is) and drives him to the brink of suicide, which might be expected for the time. However, instead of the tolerance Aesop that one would expect nowadays, the situation is resolved by the person responsible issuing an apology for making such a dire accusation against Les. In fairness, the episode did have several co-workers openly say that Les' sexual orientation was irrelevant to his job.
  • Many of the jokes in "A Commercial Break" rely on the perceived absurdity of selling funeral services pre-emptively to young, healthy people. Such services are now seen as advisable for those able to afford them, as they save a mourning family the stress of funeral arrangements.
  • Essentially the entire plot of Rumors. Bailey allows Johnny to stay at her place while his is fumigated (after literally everyone else turned him down). The rest of the episode involves the staff either being shocked that Bailey would allow a man to stay with her or certain that the reason for her doing so must be lewd. These days, such an arrangement would hardly warrant mention in an office, even if (or especially if) the arrangement was permanent. Few people would bother making assumptions, and most would consider it none of their business anyway. And yet Bailey becomes the talk of the office for letting him use the couch.
• WTH, Costuming Department?: Venus' early outfits had to be seen to be believed. Perhaps the most outlandish was the "Huggy Charms" outfit from "Goodbye, Johnny."
  • Lampshaded later in the series. Venus has toned down his wardrobe until he finds out he's to be interviewed by "Black Life" magazine, and decides to go all-out to impress the reporter. The reporter, who is actually white, asks Venus if he feels silly dressed like that, and says the hippest black guys at Black Life dress in suits.
  • Herb's loud suits were part of his dishonest, used-car-salesman personality, and were not only lampshaded on numerous occasions, but actually given a justification - the sleazy businesses that buy ads at WKRP don't trust Herb when he wears a nice new suit, so he goes back to the old ones.

---