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“Damn we’re losing all the stars of 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain,” quipped an A.V. Club comments section regular under the Mothership’s recent obit for Loni Anderson.

I can’t say I’m a fan of everything Anderson received top billing in, from a bunch of TV-movies I’ve never seen to Nurses, a ’90s Susan Harris creation she joined in its third and final season to help boost its ratings. (On Nurses, she played the new administrator at the Miami hospital where the show took place.)

However, I’m a fan of WKRP in Cincinnati, and I always liked Anderson’s work on that show. The creation of Hugh Wilson, a writer from The Tony Randall Show, WKRP jumpstarted Anderson’s career in the late ’70s, led to her becoming a sex symbol, and grew to become, despite lousy ratings when it first aired on CBS and a few creative missteps in its first three seasons, one of the most sharply written and funny workplace sitcoms ever.

“When [WKRP] was at its very best… it was as good as any situation comedy ever made, a rich mixture of smart stories, perfectly in-character lines that never sounded like jokes, and great characters who interacted beautifully and really grew and developed,” wrote Anvils, Mallets & Dynamite author Jaime Weinman, another WKRP fan, in 2005.

In honor of Anderson’s passing, the Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Shiro Sagisu’s instrumental version of “Fly Me to the Moon” from an anime show I’ve never seen, Neon Genesis Evangelion.

On the day of the death of Anderson—a brunette who always dyed her hair blond—a bunch of MST3K fans said on Bluesky that they plan to pay tribute to her by rewatching MST3K’s 2022 takedown of the terrible 1992 kids’ movie Munchie, where Anderson starred as the lead character’s mom. It’s a great Jonah-era MST3K episode, but I’d rather rewatch a few WKRP episodes and watch for the first time a bunch of WKRP episodes I never saw before.

A few years ago, I was thinking of launching a WKRP rewatch podcast I wanted to call Children of Venus—it would have led to me finally watching the dozens of WKRP episodes I still haven’t seen yet—but there were already two WKRP rewatch podcasts. One of them was Michael Grasso and Rob MacDougall’s Hold My Order, Terrible Dresser, which lasted from 2015 to 2021. I realized that another podcast about WKRP would be overkill.

I have Shout! Factory’s WKRP complete series box set, which restored about 85% of the rock and R&B songs that were removed from syndicated and streaming versions of WKRP (by MTM Enterprises and later, 20th Century Fox, which absorbed MTM), including Blondie’s “Heart of Glass,” which became a hit because Dr. Johnny Fever (Howard Hesseman) played it in the first-season episode “A Commercial Break.” (WKRP was a rare MTM sitcom that was shot on videotape because shooting it on film in the style of The Mary Tyler Moore Show would have resulted in MTM’s use of all those rock and R&B songs becoming much more expensive. Music licensing fees were lower for videotaped shows.) Even though every WKRP episode can be found on Internet Archive with all the songs intact, I still like to pop in any one of Shout!’s WKRP DVDs.

I first watched WKRP when it first came to syndication in the Bay Area in 1983. I liked how Johnny was seen playing “Master Blaster (Jammin’),” my favorite Stevie Wonder song, in one scene in “The Airplane Show,” a great example of how cool WKRP’s soundtrack was.

But I never really got into the show until I was a college radio DJ who was manning the same kind of DJ booth Johnny and Venus Flytrap (Tim Reid), WKRP-AM’s evening DJ, manned. (Wilson made Johnny and Venus’s station an AM station instead of an FM one to emphasize how bottom-of-the-barrel it was in the pilot. “I thought that if a station was so square at the beginning, it had to be AM… I thought it couldn’t be an FM station,” said the late Wilson at a 2014 Paley Center WKRP reunion panel whose 43 minutes of amusing anecdotes and relaxed banter have been preserved on YouTube.) The unpaid college radio gig caused me to often watch WKRP reruns when they were part of E!’s late ’90s lineup.

College radio was different from commercial rock radio, WKRP’s setting. It was not a high-pressure environment like commercial rock radio, and my station’s DJ booth, which was always referred to by the volunteer DJs as the air room, was much smaller than the one on WKRP. But despite those differences and the fact that WKRP was about 20 years old at the time, I related a lot to WKRP.

Some of the crises Johnny and Venus faced—like when religious fundamentalists objected to songs they played—were similar to situations I was experiencing at the time. A few listeners were not happy when I interspersed my favorite acid jazz and hip-hop tracks with selections from Snaps: The Album (a collection of “yo mama” jokes), Margaret Cho’s Drunk with Power, and Chris Rock’s Bring the Noise (God, so much of Rock’s stand-up act has aged like milk) on some afternoons. I was trying to emulate KMEL-FM drive-time DJ Rick Chase, who often interspersed the latest hip-hop and R&B hits with excerpts from stand-up acts.

I liked watching Johnny and Venus go through some things I experienced at the station. WKRP was, for the most part, accurate about radio. The only thing about WKRP that rang false was that Johnny and Venus never wore headphones when they were on the air.

The show’s accuracy was due to Wilson pulling from his experiences as a radio sales rep in Atlanta in the ’60s and the experiences of other radio industry people, one of whom used to be Hesseman, who had a brief stint as a DJ at KMPX-FM in San Francisco in 1967. WKRP was initially about the generation gap that ensues when Andy Travis (Gary Sandy), a young radio station program director from Santa Fe, moseys into Cincinnati in a cowboy hat, a shearling coat, and a pair of jeans that are tighter than Robert Conrad’s pants from The Wild Wild West and then makes major changes to a dying easy-listening station. Its last three call letters perfectly sum up the elevator music tracks Johnny unwillingly played on his morning show before Andy’s arrival.

The new program director at “the Mighty KRP” switches its format to Top 40—to the delight of the “dungarees,” represented by the perpetually stoned Johnny and aspiring broadcast journalist Bailey Quarters (Jan Smithers).

The “suits”—represented by bumbling station manager Arthur Carlson (Gordon Jump), tactless sales manager Herb Tarlek (Frank Bonner), humorless news director Les Nessman (Richard Sanders), and 30-something receptionist Jennifer Marlowe (Anderson)—are less enthusiastic about the switch to rock and R&B. The pilot ends with Andy adding a suave Black DJ from New Orleans to the lily-white staff: Venus, who falls on the side of the dungarees.

WKRP started out as both a star vehicle for Sandy and an All in the Family-style sitcom focused on clashes between the youth and the olds (or liberals and conservatives), but about halfway through the first season, Wilson and the other writers felt that the generation gap stuff was getting tiresome. They also noticed that the live studio audience was most enthusiastic about Johnny, Jennifer, or Herb.

The “dungarees vs. the suits” stuff was abandoned. WKRP evolved into an ensemble sitcom centered on much more cooperative situations between the dungarees and the suits like the station staff’s recording of a commercial jingle for a funeral home chain that wants to sell plots to KRP’s young listeners.

A more egotistical actor would have thrown tantrums about no longer being the center of the show’s attention and then quit the show, but Sandy didn’t mind being overshadowed by the rest of the cast. (“Gary was happy that the thing was becoming a gang comedy,” said Wilson in a 2015 Archive of American Television interview.) Sandy still received top billing. (He also enjoyed an affair with Anderson while she was married to Ross Bickell, who auditioned for the role of Andy and guest-starred as the villain in WKRP’s “Baseball” episode. “I was sexually addicted to him,” said Anderson about her affair with Sandy in her 1995 memoir My Life in High Heels.)

Along with those changes, Venus became a more well-rounded Black character—thanks to Wilson accepting creative input from Reid regarding his character and then Reid getting the opportunity to write a couple of episodes that focused on Venus, whose government name is Gordon Sims. The show revealed that Venus was a Vietnam War soldier who deserted the Army and became a schoolteacher who didn’t wear flashy outfits like the ones he was seen wearing to work in earlier WKRP episodes. Over at the front desk, Jennifer evolved from the icy blonde who hated working for Mr. Carlson in the pilot to a maternal (despite being younger than him) figure to him who always supported him and regularly gave him advice on how to manage the station.

One of WKRP’s most amusing running jokes was that Jennifer—the highest-paid station employee—was the opposite of a dumb blonde. She spoke seven languages. She was a financial genius who lived in a fancy, state-of-the-art penthouse apartment—her doorbell played “Fly Me to the Moon”—and her apartment was stuffed with expensive gifts that were lavished on her by the wealthy older men she preferred over male KRP co-workers like Herb and Johnny. (Unlike Herb or, to a lesser extent, Johnny, Mr. Carlson was never attracted to Jennifer because the fishing rods, model trains, and RC cars he constantly played with in his office were more attractive to him, and he was happily married to Carmen Carlson, who got along well with Jennifer and was played by Allyn Ann McLerie.)

As Jennifer, Anderson was a master at deadpan delivery and playing an office den mother, and the following 10 WKRP episodes showed why Anderson was nominated for an Emmy twice.

“Bailey’s Show” (season 1, episode 6; October 23, 1978; written by Joyce Armor and Judie Neer)

If you were a cishet man or a lesbian who watched WKRP in the ’80s or ’90s, you probably had an answer to the question “Who do you have a crush on: Bailey or Jennifer?” I had a crush on the often bespectacled Bailey—and the equally attractive Black woman Venus tried and failed to hide from Bailey in the DJ booth at the start of “Bailey’s Show,” but then she ditched their date night in the booth because he lied to her about owning the station—instead of Jennifer.

Bailey is the focus of “Bailey’s Show,” an episode where she learns to stand up for herself while Herb and Les chauvinistically oppose her creation of a news show where Johnny interviews ordinary Cincinnati citizens.

“Hugh Wilson was said to have based the character of Bailey partly on his wife, and he saw Bailey as standing for women in the workplace who have the talent and intelligence, but don’t have the extreme aggressiveness of the stereotypical working woman, and can’t always stand up for themselves with the people who are trying to keep them down,” wrote Weinman in 2009.

Though this is a Bailey episode, I recommend it because it contains the most interesting example of Jennifer’s sisterly bond with Bailey. She tries to boost Bailey’s confidence and encourages her to continue producing the initially disastrous Cincinnati Beat despite Herb and Les’s objections. I’ve seen a few people refer to Jennifer and Bailey as the ’70s and ’80s version of Joan Holloway and Peggy Olson—a perfect description of their bond.

“A Date with Jennifer” (season 1, episode 10; January 22, 1979; written by Sanders and Michael Fairman)

Family Matters is a typical example of an old sitcom where an unattractive main character keeps trying to ask out an attractive girl or woman and won’t take no for an answer. Steve Urkel wouldn’t rest until Laura Winslow, who had zero interest in her clumsy inventor neighbor, became his girlfriend, and then at the end of Family Matters’s ninth and final season, Urkel and Laura were together. (I only rarely watched Family Matters, so I quickly skimmed through Wikipedia’s entry for the show and found out that early on in that final season, Laura finally realized she had feelings for Urkel while he was dating Myra Monkhouse, played by Michelle Thomas, who died way too young at 30, a few months after Family Matters’s second and final cancellation. Urkel later dumped Myra because of her possessive behavior, and that paved the way for Urkel and Laura to become a couple.)

Unlike Family Matters, Brooklyn Nine-Nine and WKRP refused to reward repulsive and pushy men with the women they’ve been chasing. Nine-Nine initially had an arc about Detective Charles Boyle’s relentless pursuit of Detective Rosa Diaz, but it was ruining Charles’s likability, so the Nine-Nine writers wisely abandoned it, and Charles ended up in a temporary romance with Gina Linetti in the following season instead. And WKRP wisely kept Herb, a married man with two kids, from getting what he wanted: sex with Jennifer.

In the second-season episode “Put Up or Shut Up,” Bailey convinced Jennifer, who was tired of getting asked out by Herb, to finally call his bluff because she believed that he would eventually chicken out and never bother Jennifer about going out with him again. Herb doesn’t chicken out, but instead of trying to bed Jennifer during their date at her apartment, he becomes a nervous wreck who can’t stop hyperventilating and realizes that he and Jennifer are better off as platonic friends. Yet that didn’t stop Herb from continuing to make clumsy passes at Jennifer in later episodes like “Fire” (Herb: “I joined a religion that lets you have two wives.” Jennifer: “I don’t want two wives.”).

But back when Herb was not yet the complicated breadwinner—oh, yeah, and “hard worker, loyal husband, and all-around fine person”—we got to know in “Real Families,” one of WKRP’s best and most quotable episodes, he was just really, really vile, and one of the most enjoyable things about early WKRP was watching Jennifer shut down the slimy Herb’s advances in episodes like “A Date with Jennifer.” In the first season’s 10th episode, Les wins a Silver Sow award for excellence in farm news and needs a date to the awards banquet. Herb tries to show the socially awkward Les how to ask out a woman by trying out his wooing technique (“Why not grab a little gusto?”) on Jennifer, who shuts him down (“I don’t like little gustos, Herb”).

Then Les experiments with asking out Jennifer—not by being like Herb but by being himself. Jennifer is so moved by what Les says to her about how much the award means to him that she agrees to be his date, which disappoints Herb, whose pain delighted the live studio audience.

“[Frank Bonner] and Richard [Sanders], they were the glue… Loni was getting all the magazine covers, and Howard was even getting write-ups in Rolling Stone and he was invited to host Saturday Night Live. But it was Herb and Les that were the most dysfunctional and therefore funniest characters. They were just beauts to write for. I loved them to death,” said Wilson to the Archive of American Television.

The most popular scene from “A Date with Jennifer” is Les getting ready for his date and donning an ascot, a blazer, and a wig to the tune of Foreigner’s “Hot Blooded.” A clip of it became a part of WKRP’s second-season opening credits. But my favorite scene from the episode is Jennifer reacting to Herb’s wooing technique and then Les’s honesty, mostly because Anderson shifted from deadpan comedy to non-comedic, non-verbal emotion and then back to deadpan comedy so well.

After their pleasant date night, Jennifer and Les prefer to stay friends. Again, Jennifer was never romantically interested in any of her male co-workers at the station. They were too young for her.

“I Do, I Do… For Now” (season 1, episode 19; April 23, 1979; written by Tom Chehak)

The introduction of Jennifer’s extraordinary apartment—and its always amusing doorbell—features Hoyt Axton as T.J. Watson, Jennifer’s childhood sweetheart from her previously unmentioned hometown of Rock Throw, West Virginia. He comes to Cincinnati to follow up on an agreement they made when they were little kids to get married. But Jennifer doesn’t want T.J. to be a part of her idyllic life, so she pretends to be married to Johnny, who sweats and panics (and trips over steps), at first because of Jennifer’s kisses and affectionate gestures making him weak in the knees and later because of nervousness from T.J.’s threats to him.

Howard Hesseman, who was terrific at slapstick in “I Do, I Do… For Now,” and Gordon Jump had recurring roles on Soap before they were regulars on WKRP. Anderson’s comedic skills during the scenes where Jennifer lies to T.J. make me wonder how she would have fared on Soap if she played Caroline McWilliams’s role of Sally, the troubled secretary the evil Ingrid Svenson blackmails into seducing Burt Campbell, her boss. She would have nailed it.

But the best scene in “I Do, I Do… For Now”—the penultimate scene—is stolen not by Anderson but by a non-actor: WKRP stage manager Buzz Sapien, who played a bystander in an elevator who becomes absorbed by Jennifer’s apology to T.J. for lying to him.

“MTM shows loved to have some random stranger saying strange things during a climactic scene; when in doubt about how to make the wrapping-up scene funny, put a wisecracking bystander into the mix,” wrote Weinman in a 2010 blog post about “I Do, I Do… For Now.”

This episode was part of a string of episodes where WKRP experienced its best ratings because in January 1979, CBS moved it to after M*A*S*H, its most popular sitcom, at 9:30pm on Mondays.

“It was a simpler time. We all gathered for ‘destination television,’ which no longer exists. There were three networks. Three hours of prime time. That was it,” said Anderson to Palm Springs Life in 2021 about why she thought WKRP fans are still fond of the show and its late ’70s/early ’80s milieu. “But I also think what Hugh did with the show was make the humor come out of the story and not out of the joke because jokes get dated and a story that has a humor never goes out of style.”

“Jennifer’s Home for Christmas” (season 2, episode 11; December 17, 1979; written by Dan Guntzelman and Steve Marshall)

In the first of WKRP’s only two Christmas episodes, everybody at Jennifer’s modest KRP office Christmas party is grouchy about the holiday season except for Andy, Venus, and Jennifer, whose favorite holiday is Christmas. The lack of Christmas spirit upsets Jennifer, who storms out of the party.

Bailey and Venus realize that Jennifer, who thinks of the KRP staff as her family away from her actual family in West Virginia, is too proud to tell anyone that she’s going to be alone on Christmas, so Venus hastily comes up with a way for him and Johnny to apologize to her for the awkward party. It turns out that Venus and Johnny aren’t the only ones from the station who show up at Jennifer’s apartment to apologize.

“This is Loni Anderson’s best performance to date,” wrote Roy Penney in his 2016 review of “Jennifer’s Home for Christmas” for his excellent blog WKRP Relived.

Nah, Anderson’s performance in “A Date with Jennifer” is slightly better. But her performance in “Jennifer’s Home for Christmas” is still pretty good, and the episode is full of delightful bits. Jennifer slips into the Appalachian accent she worked hard to bury while talking on the phone to her Appalachian mom. Venus makes a grand entrance in the ’70s version of a Black Santa outfit.

George Gaynes—the husband of the aforementioned McLerie and the future Commandant Lassard in the most popular movie Wilson directed, the original Police Academy—speaks nothing but French as one of Jennifer’s wealthy suitors and then immediately leaves.

Best of all, Jennifer wears in her apartment the exact same ruffled white shirt and blue velvet suit Austin Powers later wore. You keep expecting her doorbell to play “Soul Bossa Nova” instead of “Fly Me to the Moon.”

“Filthy Pictures” (season 2, episodes 21 and 22; March 3, 1980; story by Wilson; teleplay by Guntzelman and Marshall)

One of the only two WKRP episodes where Anderson did fan service by wearing a skimpy outfit (the other was “Baseball,” but unlike “Baseball,” she wears the skimpy outfit in only one scene), “Filthy Pictures” is one of dozens of WKRP episodes that are new to me. Thanks to the Shout! box set, I watched “Filthy Pictures” in its original form: as a one-hour episode instead of the version that was split into two parts for syndication and was heavily trimmed. However, the version of the full, uninterrupted “Filthy Pictures” that was posted by a fan on Internet Archive contains (at the start of Mr. Carlson’s delivery of bad news to Jennifer) the 1972 Gladys Knight & the Pips hit “Neither One of Us (Wants to Be the First to Say Goodbye),” which Shout! wasn’t able to clear.

“Filthy Pictures” is about the staff’s attempts to stop a sleazy photographer (played by Spaceballs villain George Wyner, one of my favorite frequent Rockford Files guest stars) from releasing nude photos he took of Jennifer without her consent. As an episode about Jennifer’s colleagues and Mr. Carlson’s surprisingly touching transformation into a protective father to Jennifer (usually, he’s more like her son), “Filthy Pictures” is above-average and often funny. The climax is less like a WKRP episode and more like a Leverage episode where Johnny and Bailey replaced Nate and Sophia as, respectively, the mastermind and the grifter and then told Hardison, Eliot, and Parker to take a vacation.

But as a Jennifer episode, “Filthy Pictures” is merely okay. It’s like one of those earlier Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episodes where Dax’s career or life is on the line, but Terry Farrell barely has any screen time. I was surprised that Anderson doesn’t have a lot of scenes in this super-sized episode where Jennifer is so beloved by her co-workers that they’re willing to risk being thrown into jail to protect her. However, Anderson gets the last word at the end of “Filthy Pictures,” and Jennifer’s closing line is the best line in the entire episode.

During WKRP’s summer hiatus after the airing of “Filthy Pictures,” Anderson wanted more—now that she was the show’s most popular cast member.

“The Farrah Fawcett-Majors posters of a few years earlier gave way to posters of the buxom Loni. She… soon landed the juicy role of Jayne Mansfield in a made-for-television movie about the life of that sex symbol of an earlier era,” said TV historians Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh about what Anderson was up to in the summer of 1980 in the 1995 edition of The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows: 1946-Present. “All the adulation went to her—or her agent’s—head, and, like Farrah, she quickly demanded a huge increase in salary or she would leave [WKRP]. Unlike Farrah, she got it, and stayed.”

“Baby, It’s Cold Inside” (season 3, episode 8; January 3, 1981; written by Blake Hunter)

My second favorite third-season WKRP episode (“Real Families” is my favorite from that season), the winter-set “Baby, It’s Cold Inside” begins with Johnny knocking back brandy to stay warm while on the air because the furnace in the Flimm Building, the fictional building where KRP is headquartered, is on the fritz. Mama Carlson—KRP’s ruthless owner and Mr. Carlson’s domineering mother—drops by the station unexpectedly, demands from Johnny a bottle of his brandy for her and Jennifer to enjoy, and offers to completely forget about Johnny’s illegal drinking of booze while on the job if he plays her request for some Gershwin.

The brandy loosens up both Jennifer and Mama Carlson, whose ruthlessness fades as she gets to know each of the people who work for her absent and late-to-work son. (Only Johnny remains scared of her.) The episode contains the first of several moments in the series where Mama Carlson is thirsty for Andy.

“Baby, It’s Cold Inside” was a showcase for Carol Bruce, the second and final actress who played Lillian Carlson. (Sylvia Sidney played Lillian only once—in the pilot—and then Bruce took over the role in a clip show episode I’ve never watched because I hate clip show episodes.) Bruce got to sing in the episode’s funniest scene (Lillian reveals that she was a Broadway singer, just like Bruce was), as well as humanize a previously unsympathetic character. “Baby, It’s Cold Inside” writer Blake Hunter went on to co-create Who’s the Boss? That show wasn’t as great as WKRP, but it shared with “Baby, It’s Cold Inside” a knack for bringing depth to a tightly wound businesswoman character.

“During his years on WKRP, he imbued every character with dignity, defying all temptation to mock or ridicule for an easy laugh,” wrote WKRP expert (and PS Classics record label co-founder) Tommy Krasker in a 2015 blog post about why Hunter is one of his favorite sitcom writers. “His writing avoided histrionics — it never strained for effect; he simply offered up the cadences of everyday speech, and the interactions of everyday people, as its own aesthetic.”

When Mr. Carlson finally arrives to work in the final scene, the reason for Lillian’s surprise visit to the Flimm Building is revealed, and it’s a bit of a gut punch. That second and final act of “Baby, It’s Cold Inside” was the point when Bruce—like Andrew Robinson, Aron Eisenberg, Louise Fletcher, and Jeffrey Combs on DS9 in the early ’90s or Linda Hunt, John Larroquette, and Holland Taylor on The Practice later on in that same decade—became a beloved part of the show even though she wasn’t a regular. The same thing later happened to Ian Wolfe when his screen time as Hirsch, Lillian’s sarcastic butler, was increased in WKRP’s fourth and final season.

Bruce was such a great team player that her interplay with Gary Sandy finally gave Sandy more to do than just be the usual calm in the storm and the straight man in the cast during the fourth-season arc about the station’s unexpected ratings ascent, an arc that includes one of my favorite fourth-season episodes, “The Consultant.” (“Andy doesn’t really become interesting until Season 4, when he acquires a more ruthless side,” said Krasker in a rundown of the final season, his favorite WKRP season.)

Anderson also shined in “Baby, It’s Cold Inside.” Although WKRP pushed for a romance between Johnny and Bailey (the show was canceled before it could have blossomed into something more serious), Johnny also sometimes flirted with Jennifer. In the DJ booth during the cold open, the brandy intensifies Johnny and Jennifer’s chemistry—until Mama Carlson pops up like an It Follows entity and snaps a terrified Johnny out of the grown and sexy mood. Anderson was good at playing drunk. She was also a terrific scene partner to Bruce, whose character ends up bonding with Jennifer over brandy because they realize they have a lot in common: They’re glamorous, skilled at business, often underestimated by men, and rather lonely despite the wealth that surrounds them—or the wealthy admirers who surround Jennifer.

“Ask Jennifer” (season 3, episode 15; February 14, 1981; written by Armor and Neer)

“Ask Jennifer,” an ambitiously structured episode about Jennifer’s stint as Arlene, the host of Ask Arlene, KRP’s new call-in advice show, comes from a string of Very Special Episodes Weinman wasn’t a fan of when he covered WKRP for Something Old, Nothing New, his old Blogspot blog. Weinman also posted in their entirety the original versions of WKRP episodes to quietly protest how badly WKRP reruns were ruined when in the ’90s, MTM started replacing Johnny and Venus’s often great playlist picks with generic crap. (As a result, there are more Something Old, Nothing New posts about WKRP than there are about Looney Tunes, the subject of Weinman’s Anvils, Mallets & Dynamite.)

Written by the same pair of women who wrote “Bailey’s Show,” “Ask Jennifer” is one of the better Very Special Episodes because there is zero preachiness (the episode is the opposite of Diff’rent Strokes’s Very Special Episodes), and Anderson was very good in the non-comedic moments where Jennifer blames herself after she finds out her advice to a caller caused her to be a domestic violence victim.

“She gets to be at her quip-y best, while also being very sensitive in crying over [Ask Arlene caller] Not Joan and caring for Mr. Carlson. Anderson would be nominated for the Emmy for Best Supporting Actress this season,” noted Penney in his 2018 review of “Ask Jennifer.”

The one thing that sucks about “Ask Jennifer” is that it ends with Jennifer going back to just being KRP’s receptionist. WKRP would have been an even better show if she was both the receptionist and the fourth on-air personality we regularly saw in the booth, in addition to Johnny, Venus, and Les.

“Jennifer and the Will” (season 4, episode 8; December 2, 1981; written by Hunter)

Because he hated his greedy relatives and didn’t trust any of them, a retired WWII colonel who dated Jennifer—before he died peacefully in front of her while they enjoyed dinner at a French bistro—named her as the executrix of his estate (Les: “What is an executrix?” Herb: “I dunno. High heels and a whole lot of leather. Something like that.”).

Krasker wrote in 2015 that “Jennifer and the Will” contains one of Anderson’s best performances as Jennifer. He said, “Like so many of Hunter’s scripts, and like much of WKRP Season 4, the episode is about someone having to cope outside their comfort zone, and Jennifer’s response [to the colonel’s death and her new responsibilities] is a slow descent, from resolve… to stoicism… to despair… It’s poignant and unsettling — we’re not used to seeing Jennifer rattled. Her self-confidence has always been her most dependable (and inspiring) trait.”

I wouldn’t recommend “Jennifer and the Will” to people who aren’t fans of massive age gaps between romantic partners. However, it’s fun to see Jennifer defying the colonel’s smug and argumentative siblings, who plan to contest his will and try to smear Jennifer in the press as a heartless gold digger. And it’s even more fun to see Pat O’Brien from Angels with Dirty Faces dominating one scene where his colonel character’s videotaped will is played on a VCR (one of the episode’s best jokes, which was overlooked by the live studio audience, is when Jennifer mentions to the family’s lawyer that she has several VCRs, a reference to the gifts that have piled up in her apartment), and from the screen, he boosts Jennifer’s confidence and then proceeds to tear apart each of his siblings.

“The Consultant” (season 4, episode 9; December 30, 1981; written by Wilson)

The 1978 Thanksgiving episode “Turkeys Away” is WKRP’s most famous and most frequently quoted episode (“As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly”), but it isn’t the funniest. “The Consultant” is funnier than “Turkeys Away,” the same episode that was trashed in a 2013 A.V. Club roundtable discussion between writers that included Sonia Saraiya—the same critic who once confused Kumail Nanjiani with Kunal Nayyar—and David Sims. I’ve never read a single word of that roundtable discussion, which raised the ire of WKRP fans. “Turkeys Away” isn’t terrible. As for the writers who trashed the episode and WKRP as a whole, I’m not going to waste my time with any of their writing because they trashed “Turkeys Away” and WKRP.

“Turkeys Away,” the first season’s seventh episode, is an amusing Thanksgiving episode, but it represents a version of WKRP Wilson quickly drifted away from—the aforementioned “dungarees vs. the suits” show that got CBS interested in adding Wilson’s creation to its lineup—and is not the WKRP I fell in love with in the ’90s. Worst of all, Venus wasn’t fully developed yet. (Tim Reid once perfectly described the show’s initial depiction of Venus as “my character would come in, flash his clothes, and leave.”) Meanwhile, “The Consultant” is the best example of the WKRP I remember: It’s way past the stage of Venus being too flat of a Black character, and the dungarees and the suits are way past their initial differences and are often banding together to keep the scrappy little station they love from being sanitized, dismantled, disrespected, or deprived of one work family member.

The threat to the station in “The Consultant” is silk-shirted “station doctor” Norris Breeze, an old friend of Andy’s from his days in the Albuquerque radio market. He was sent to evaluate KRP by Lillian, whose scenes at her mansion in this episode are stolen by the aforementioned Wolfe as the dry-witted Hirsch. Breeze—who first alienates Andy in his hotel room when he offers him some of his cocaine because Andy wants nothing to do with coke—is played by David Clennon, best known as the villainous Miles Drentell from both Thirtysomething and Once and Again, while I know him best as Palmer in The Thing.

The consultant created a programming service—he argues that the age of DJs playing their own stuff is passé and snarks that Johnny’s playlist is stuck in 1962—and he wants to add KRP to the 45 stations that subscribe to his service, which would mean he would take control of KRP’s playlists. If Andy won’t buy his service, he’ll give KRP a negative evaluation that will cost its staffers their jobs.

“[Breeze’s creation] is of course the way radio has gone. Virgin Radio, Clear Channel and I Heart Radio now don’t only program 45 stations – they program hundreds at a time. But Wilson is fighting against this and Andy is his stand-in… Wilson is arguing for [a] very personal approach to the music and the audience,” wrote Penney in his 2019 review of “The Consultant.”

This episode is a precursor to the frustrations with Hollywood’s creative bankruptcy Wilson expressed in his writing for The Famous Teddy Z. Andy’s response to his friend-turned-enemy’s scheme is to get everyone at the station to act the opposite of their normal selves during Breeze’s inspection so that his written report to Lillian will be useless.

Mr. Carlson puts away the toys in his office and transforms into a busy station manager. Les, the most humorless dude in the Flimm Building, pretends to be the type of newsman who prefers to cover lighthearted stories. Herb ditches his plaid suits for a solid-colored suit, adopts a much less oily demeanor, and ignores Jennifer when she caresses his tie. Venus pretends to be a scary Black man who mugs Johnny in front of Breeze to the tune of James Brown’s “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.”

Bailey, the competent and ambitious college graduate, transforms into a stoner whose big accomplishment of the day is singing Farfel the Dog’s Nestlé commercial jingle from the ’50s and ’60s. And in the funniest and most mischievous personality change, Jennifer raises the pitch of her voice (“Mr. Carlson, look, it’s Mr. Breezy!”), acts like all of her brain cells were deleted, and expresses her disdain for how much of a blowhard Breeze is by interrupting him when he speaks. Anderson ran away with the “opposite selves” half of the episode.

“Loni Anderson became such a pop-culture punchline — for that brief shining moment when she filled the role of ‘designated blonde sexpot who dominates the tabloid coverage until you’re sick of it all’ — that people forget how funny she was on ‘WKRP.’ She had terrific comedy timing, not only when it came to line delivery, but perfectly-timed gestures,” wrote Weinman in 2006. “Too bad her post-WKRP career didn’t give her many opportunities to use her comedy skills.”

“To Err Is Human” (season 4, episode 21; August 9, 1982; written by Lissa Levin)

WKRP didn’t have a proper series finale. CBS canceled it right when MTV, which was only about a year old, was beginning to affect the music industry and Martha Quinn—from MTV’s first generation of VJs—was about to become a household name. Weinman wrote that if WKRP hadn’t been canceled, its fifth season would have contained more stories that would have been like “To Err Is Human,” an episode about one of KRP’s most incompetent employees struggling to get his shit together in the midst of the station’s newfound success. That season, which would have been 1982-83, would have been about how KRP is no longer a struggling station.

Weinman didn’t imagine what the sixth season would have been like. It would have been 1983-84, the same period when MTV stopped being afraid of playing Black artists’ music videos and Michael Jackson’s videos for his singles from Thriller helped to establish MTV as a cultural force. I’m picturing in my head that the sixth season would have been about the staff adjusting to MTV eclipsing radio as the center of youth culture as KRP—already an anachronism in the eyes of radio industry folks like Breeze in “The Consultant”—becomes even more of an anachronism in the era of music videos.

The final WKRP episode that was taped (but not the final one that aired on CBS, and the less said about The New WKRP in Cincinnati, the Wilson-less sequel series, the better), “To Err Is Human” features a bunch of entertaining examples of Jennifer’s ingenuity as an office den mother. The episode opens with Herb’s latest expensive screwup, which involves an ad campaign for Soul Suds, a shampoo marketed to Black men.

Instead of paying a professional photographer to photograph Venus, Soul Suds’s new pitchman, the lazy Herb photographed a tuxedo-clad Venus by himself, pocketed the money, and accidentally sent to the printers a photo of himself in a chef’s hat barbecuing burger patties. Cincinnati is now bombarded with cardboard standees of Herb in a chef’s hat saying, “My hair’s laid back and so am I with Soul Suds.” Mr. Carlson prepares to fire Herb.

But Jennifer doesn’t think Herb should be fired, so she orders him to go down to their client’s office and save his job by apologizing to Hester Sherman, the blind CEO of the company that makes Soul Suds—played by an actual blind celebrity: author and musician Tom Sullivan. Then she summons Les, makes up an excuse that Mr. Carlson needs him to show him how the metric system works, and gets Les to distract him for over an hour while Herb is off to straighten out his mistake. But Herb messes that up as well and causes KRP to lose the client, so Jennifer makes one last effort to fix everything and appeals to Mr. Sherman to give Herb another chance because “WKRP is a very unusual radio station. We hire some people that otherwise couldn’t get jobs at another radio station.”

Jennifer is fighting for Herb because in spite of many years of being hit on by him in the corniest or grossest ways, she admits that she has grown to like him, and in episodes like “Jennifer and the Will” and “Fire,” she has come to see his value as a colleague. Both her empathy towards the disabled CEO—something Herb didn’t extend to him when he came to his office—and her candor cause the CEO to change his mind about Herb.

Krasker said that “To Err Is Human” nicely illustrates “the growing pains of a newly successful radio station: where the strong have to look after the weak; where the weak will vow to change, and probably can’t; where change is inevitable and gratifying and terrifying, and rumors rampant and indistinguishable from fact. Where everyone is suddenly in new, uncharted territory where even the best will fail — but they’ll fail together, and with any luck, they might just fail up.”

The final image of the final episode that was shot is Jennifer looking pleased about the fact that she put out another fire at work and shielded her boss from another crisis that was better left in her hands. It’s not a bad image for the series to end on, and it’s not a bad visual epitaph for the life of Anderson, who gave us so many entertaining moments as a witty and intelligent blonde on WKRP, either.