{"id":549,"date":"2006-05-08T13:38:47","date_gmt":"2006-05-08T13:38:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=549"},"modified":"2006-05-08T13:38:47","modified_gmt":"2006-05-08T13:38:47","slug":"why_krp_was_cool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2006\/05\/08\/why_krp_was_cool\/","title":{"rendered":"Why ‘KRP Was Cool"},"content":{"rendered":"

Media critic Jaime J. Weinman<\/a> on what was so good about one of my all-time favorite TV shows, WKRP in Cincinnati<\/i>:<\/p>\n

“WKRP” has never really had a reputation on a par with “Taxi” or “Mary Tyler Moore” or “Barney Miller” or “M*A*S*H,” but I think it was actually the best sitcom of its era when it came to the most important thing a sitcom can do: create memorable, distinctive characters and create comedy from those characters, instead of a lot of extraneous jokes. The characters on “WKRP” were all so well-defined that seeing them act out of character, even slightly out of character, could be inherently funny, and the characters all had different and well-defined relationships to each other, so you could put any two characters together in a scene and get a different type of comedy out of it.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The other thing Wilson did with the show was give it more variety than most sitcoms: it’s not just that they’d do an occasional “very special episode,” like the one about the Who concert in Cincinnati where kids were trampled to death; they would actually change the style and tone from week to week depending on what the story was about. So one week it would be a farce, another week a dramedy, still another week a traditional sitcom story and still another week an extended comedy sketch (there is one episode, “Hotel Oceanview,” that is literally an adaptation of a Toronto Second City sketch by the same writer). “Mary Tyler Moore” and other MTM and MTM-style shows valued consistency in style and tone; “WKRP” fluctuated and experimented more, which may explain why it was treated as the red-headed stepchild at MTM (“I wouldn’t watch it” — Mary Tyler Moore).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The rest of his post<\/a> contains a whole mess of ‘KRP clips for your viewing pleasure. Go on over and have a look…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Media critic Jaime J. Weinman on what was so good about one of my all-time favorite TV shows, WKRP in Cincinnati: “WKRP” has never really had a reputation on a par with “Taxi” or “Mary Tyler Moore” or “Barney Miller” or “M*A*S*H,” but I think it was actually the best sitcom of its era when […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-glass-teat"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=549"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}