October 31, 2017
Writers: Steve Marshall
Director: Rod Daniel
Original Air Date: February 7, 1981
Call it the dungarees versus the disco suits.
This is a strangely dated episode of "WKRP in Cincinnati" even for 1981. Today it plays like an episode of "Mad Men" in which the audience is constantly asking "Is that really how things happened?"
I believe this episode exists for reasons outside of the story, which I will get to later. Storywise, the entire HOUR LONG episode is based on the premise of business versus authenticity. This is the moment, dear readers, in which the baby boomer generation (the "dungarees" of these past three season) must enter the Dark Night of the Soul and decide to either cling to their fading, tie-dyed ideals or embrace the Reagan-era, trickle down "greed is good" aesthetic and do what is best for business, best for your own wants and best for the bottom line. For John Caravella, this decision will literally rip his mind in half.
Writing a blog 36 years after this show aired means the direction of society has already been decided. Johnny has been perpetually broke since we first met him. If "Gotta Dance" is going to pay him $500 a week, that's more than Jennifer makes (we learned in Ep. 10 she is the highest paid employee at WKRP at $24,000 a year) PLUS he gets to keep his WKRP job. We saw in this season's "Daydreams" episode, Johnny longs to be the decadent, adored rock star figure he has always admired. Since getting fired in LA, Johnny's always been looking for a way to get back on top. The song he plays as his defiant send off from "Gotta Dance" is "Ready Teddy" by Little Richard, an artist who wore makeup and sparkling costumes to help sell his music. In 2017, there's not even a decision to be made: Dr. Fever would have taken the money and played music he didn't like. As the Ripper himself says "The dude was stuck in the 60's and these are the 80's!"
But we as the audience are suppose to see Johnny as our better selves, the side that is never going to sell out. Loyal to the ideal that Rock 'n Roll can change the world, we are rooting for Johnny to have his Rip Tide cake and eat his WKRP cake too (sorry for strangling that metaphor). We want to be Johnny and believe we could walk away from both the big payday and the legal threats just to stand by our convictions.
We need to see the producer, Avis, as the face of the bad guys: the corporate suits. We need to forget that Johnny signed contracts, drunk, without a lawyer and then tried to back out 45 minutes before the show was to air.
Which begs the larger question: why hire Johnny Fever for a TV Dance show? Venus Fly Trap, who regularly plays a style of music more in line with what the producer wants, is literally standing right beside him! If this producer ever listened to Johnny's show, in which he famously never plays the hits, why would she think he'd be a good host for "Gotta Dance"? After looking at him, in his dark, rumbled T-shirt and sagging skin (sorry Howard) no one would hire him to host this show. If he was so important to it success, it would have been called "Dr. Fever's Dance Prescription" and replacing him with a no-name Rip Tide would have killed it.
I've written all of this and none of it matters. Because none of that is why this show was written, and certainly not why it had to be an hour long. This episode is an acting showcase for Howard Hesseman. He was nominated the season previously for an Emmy and would be again this season. I was not able to confirm if he was nominated in 1981 for this episode in particular but I be surprised if it wasn't. Hesseman plays both characters to their fullest, sometimes within the same sentence!
Johnny isn't just ashamed of the Rip Tide character he created - he's paranoid of him! He genuinely is afraid this "schlemiel" is going to take over his life. Johnny goes from casually taking on this new job to anger and fear about the job to glee that he's fooling people with this new persona to fearing the persona to regretting the whole thing happened. Rip Tide moves from being thrilled to perform to ambitious about his career to annoyed Johnny is holding him back. That's a lot for one actor to keep a handle on and Hesseman navigates well.
I'd love to get a commentary from Hesseman on this episode, describing how much was on the page and how much was improvised. We know about his years with the San Francisco improv troop the Committee and how he drew on that time to play Johnny Fever. I want to know if he came up with "I could eat you up Jennipoo. Yum, yum yum!" on the spot.
So many good lines! "My wink is my word, digez vous?" "The undoubtably soulful Oblivious Neutron Bomb!" "Well, I Gotta Dance! Hug hug!"
I felt a little split myself figuring out what to write this blog about. I was going to write a whole piece on schizophrenia and how it is NOT split personality disorder. And how Les can not claim to be "something of an expert" on it because he saw "Three Faces of Eve." I could have also written quite a bit about the relationship between Herb and The Ripper, and that Herb is the first person, even before Avis, to see what the potential of Rip Tide could be. I also gave some thought to how poorly Venus and Bailey treated John Caravella. If he wasn't going to be the Dr. Fever they knew, they were ready to abandon him. I also could go on at great lengths about how the time in this episode is too condensed. Johnny becomes Rip in under an hour. It seems like the whole "Gotta Dance" phenomena lasted a month at most.
But I'm going to wrap it up the way the episode wrapped it up - discussing payola. We saw in Ep. 14 "Johnny Comes Back" that the one unforgivable thing in radio (or even radio on the television) is to suggest the band or label have paid to have their songs played. Johnny knew that treating people badly, drinking, drugs, insulting his audience or even an interest in "really young girls" would not be enough to make the Rip Tide character unsellable. But saying he's only playing a song because it's been paid for is the death knell. Although that might have been a lie, it was only because Johnny was getting paid that Rip was pretending to like these songs as well. Where did the real payola start and excuse payola end? Maybe the way to judge would be to have Jennifer defiantly say "No! I really liked those songs."
Roy
Other Notes - Mary Frann, who played Avis, went on to her greatest success playing Bob Newhart's wife, Joanne, on "Newhart," which was also an MTM Production. She died in 1998. "Gotta Dance" is based on the nationally syndicated dance show "Solid Gold" which ran from 1980 to, surprisingly, 1988. Allen Carr was a producer and manager whose clients included "the undoubtedly soulful" Olivia Newton-John, Ann-Margaret, Herb Alpert and many more. He also produce the films "Grease" and the Village People's "Can't Stop the Music."
No comments:
Post a Comment