WKRP in Cincinnati Reunion: Interview With Show Creator Hugh Wilson

Earlier this week, we spoke with WKRP in Cincinnati show creator Hugh Wilson prior to the cast reunion at the Beverly Hills location of the Paley Center for Media.

Wilson, whose other credits include writing for The Bob Newhart Show, The Tony Randall Show and the movie Police Academy; creating Easy Street, The Famous Teddy Z, and Frank’s Place; and directing The First Wives Club, Guarding Tess and the first Police Academy, joined series stars Loni Anderson, Jan Smithers, Tim Reid, and Howard Hesseman as well as directors Jay Sandrich and Asaad Kelada for a reunion Q&A. You can find photos from the reunion here.

“You know, we were never really that popular, but I thought we were kind of smart,” Wilson said when asked about why the series – which took place at a radio station in Cincinnati – has endured. The show weathered timeslot changes and lasted for four years, but the show’s true sign of success came when the series entered syndication. “When we went into syndication, we did way better than any other MTM show — Mary, Phyllis, Rhoda, Hill Street… we were the king of syndication, which means that people were still finding us, and hopefully we did a couple of memorable things,” Wilson recalled.

Perhaps the most famous WKRP episode, “Turkeys Away” – punctuated by the famous line “As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!” – actually came from a real event that happened at a radio station in Atlanta. Wilson recalled how he met with the station manager Jerry Blum and asked if he knew of any funny things that happened at the station. “He said ‘well, we threw a turkey out of a helicopter once, and that got someone fired…’ and I said ‘Stop. Start from the beginning.’ I was writing this down, because that’s found gold,” Wilson said.

“It really happened, and of course, I tried to highlight the humor of it as much as possible, but it was a real event, and it was far more funny than anything I could have cooked up!” he enthused.

Another real-life inspiration for WKRP came from the name of one of the characters, Andy Travis, who was named for Wilson’s cousin, who sadly recently passed away. “He was a retired Miami-Dade County policeman. He retired to the panhandle of Florida, where he fished every day for the last 15 years. He died about a month ago. Andy was my hero, so I gave kind of a shout-out to him. He was my cousin, a couple of years older than me, and I thought he was like a demi-god,” Wilson recalled. Did people come up to him and make light of his name? “I think after a while, he’d get a little tired of it,” Wilson laughed.

As for some other iconic WKRP characters, Wilson asserted that Les Nessman was “pretty much my imagination” but Herb Tarlek’s inspiration was a man named Clark Brown. “He is retired, and had a wonderful career in radio. He was an advertising salesman. I ran with Herb, but Clark was never embarrassed of it. He’d tell everyone. He’d wear a $2000 suit, insisting he’s Herb Tarlek.”

After a not-so-stellar reaction to a WKRP in Cincinnati Season 1 DVD set from a few years ago, the series will get another chance at home video release soon with a complete series set from Shout! Factory. “I’m so excited,” Wilson enthused. “I just talked to an executive at Shout! and they are trying to get this music relicensed, and they’ve had about 85% success.” Syndicated prints of the series – and the former DVD release – both were full of music substitutions and even had content cut out to avoid paying music royalties. “They tried to cut it up to get the music out of it,” Wilson said about the previous release. “They sent me one to look at; I watched about 7 minutes of it and said ‘I can’t do this. I’ll be a good soldier and say to please buy the DVD,’ but they brought it out, they took us out to New York – Loni Anderson, Tim Reid, Howard Hesseman, and myself, and we went on the Today Show to hype the thing, and then we went and we were interviewed by deejays all over the country, and boom! All of the deejays came on and said ‘Hugh, they screwed up your show!’ Every big-time morning guy in the country was yelling ‘DON’T BUY THIS’!” Ideally, the new set will have a warmer reception.

Wilson admitted that he “likes to speculate” what the WKRP crew would be doing now, 35 years later, though he hasn’t written anything down. The early 1990s followup to WKRP, The New WKRP in Cincinnati, lasted two seasons but did not feature his involvement. “I didn’t have anything to do with that,” Wilson recalled. “I was asked, and at the time I was directing some movies, and I lived in Virginia, and I thought that I could have that lifestyle if I directed movies. If you do TV, you’ve got to be there.”

Stay tuned to KSiteTV for more interviews from the WKRP reunion soon! Our thanks to Hugh Wilson and the Paley Center for making this interview possible.