WKRP and Music

I picked up the first season of WKRP in Cincinnati on DVD the other day and I've already watched almost half of the season. What a fantastic show! WKRP was always one of my favourite situation-comedies, and now that I've had the chance to watch it from the beginning all over again, I really am struck by how well the actors and writers had the characters nailed down, even in the pilot episode. When I watch first season episodes of some of my other favourite sit-coms I have many moments of discomfort as I see the actors struggle to find their roles. Seinfeld, Friends and Everybody Loves Raymond are three examples of high quality sit-coms and three of my favourites of all time, yet there are many examples of poor characterization in the early shows. I'd have to say that Cheers compares to WKRP in terms of having character roles fairly polished right from the start. In my opinion each of the five programs mentioned had fantastic character development over their respective runs, I just feel that WKRP and Cheers had a head start.

Wondering what the hell a discussion about sit-coms has to do with a music blog? Well, the entire reason it has taken so long for WKRP in Cincinnati to be released on DVD is due to the licensing issues of all of the snippets of the great songs that Johnny Fever and Venus Flytrap played on-fictitious-air. I could go on at length about how stupid this is, but this page does a much better job than I could. I'm fairly certain that if the decisions were completely left to the original artists that the vast majority of them would be happy to have snippets of some of their songs introduced to a younger audience. Of course since most of the licensing issues would be decided by the labels, the bottom line of the precious dollar is more important than keeping an amazing show like WKRP in its original form. Unfortunately the powers-that-be decided that dubbing generic music over all of the original recordings would be the best course of action. And if that's not bad enough, they even dubbed some of the original character voices if any of the dialog took place over the original music. One of the most classic moments in all of the show's history is when Johnny was first allowed to change the format and play rock music. As he spins up the record he grabs the microphone with one hand and kinda "rock star's" with it, and unfortunately the generic music dubbed over is a completely different tempo, making Johnny Fever look like he can't keep a beat!

Anyhow, as much as the lack of original music does lessen my excitement, it's still great to be able to watch the show whenever I want.