As someone who worked in radio in real life I must say I love WKRP in Cincinnati, but so much of it is so unbelievable.

1. Johnny talking on air without the use of headphones, and the sound running in the booth. There would be so much feedback that nothing would be comprehensible.
2. Just one person handling continuity for a station in the market place the size of Cincinnati. I worked in a tertiary market, Primary (big city), secondary (medium sized city), tertiary (small town), and we had two people doing continuity.
3. Why is Venus there during the day? Isn't he the overnight guy. When I did
overnights, I would head home and get some sleep.
4. I know Johnny and Andy fight about this all the time, but any d.j. that did not stick to the format would not last two weeks in real radio.
5. And n the subject of Johnny, why is he not p.d or at least assistant program director. Most stations have the program director as an on air person, usually the morning man.
6. I can accept Herb as real, I actually knew a salesman like Herb, the only difference is he made sales. It does seem however that Herb is at the station a lot. Most radio sales people are on the road a lot making calls.
7. Also where was the production studio where the commercials were cut. I do not think I ever saw another studio other than the main booth where we usually saw Johnny or Venus.
Just a few ponderings from an ex d.j.

There was an episode that show the staff of WKRP cutting a commercial in a recording studio. It was a commercial for a funeral home and it only aired on WKRP once before Mr. Carlson pulled it and cancelled the contract beleiving the commercial to be in poor taste.

As someone who worked in radio in real life I must say I love WKRP in Cincinnati, but so much of it is so unbelievable.

1. Johnny talking on air without the use of headphones, and the sound running in the booth. There would be so much feedback that nothing would be comprehensible.
2. Just one person handling continuity for a station in the market place the size of Cincinnati. I worked in a tertiary market, Primary (big city), secondary (medium sized city), tertiary (small town), and we had two people doing continuity.
3. Why is Venus there during the day? Isn't he the overnight guy. When I did
overnights, I would head home and get some sleep.
4. I know Johnny and Andy fight about this all the time, but any d.j. that did not stick to the format would not last two weeks in real radio.
5. And n the subject of Johnny, why is he not p.d or at least assistant program director. Most stations have the program director as an on air person, usually the morning man.
6. I can accept Herb as real, I actually knew a salesman like Herb, the only difference is he made sales. It does seem however that Herb is at the station a lot. Most radio sales people are on the road a lot making calls.
7. Also where was the production studio where the commercials were cut. I do not think I ever saw another studio other than the main booth where we usually saw Johnny or Venus.
Just a few ponderings from an ex d.j.

As a former program director/talk show host/news director/continuity writer, I agree that livin' on the air in Cincinnati isn't quite the way we lived it, Disney Rob! I worked at WGNU Radio in Granite City, Illinois, which is about six miles east of St. Louis (hence my "living on the air in Granite City." (The station is still on the air today as a CBS Sports radio affiliate.)

In 1979, a short-lived magazine called Broadcast Programming and Production did a cover story on 'WKRP" which specifically pointed out some of the major differences between real life radio and radio as portrayed on television. One of them was the fact that the music played even while Johnny Fever was talking. As we both know, when the mics are on, the monitors go off--but TV viewers don't necessarily know that (unless like us, they are radio rats!). The viewer wouldn't understand why the song suddenly cuts off when the DJ opens his mic.

The station for which I worked from 1974 to 2007 had a large number of sales staff, some of whom actually did travel outside the station; some of them worked the equivalent of a boiler-room and do nothing but call businesses to sell them a cheap "public-service safety campaign" with copy that needed serious work to be believable. One salesman would preface his copy with, "Now I'm no Walter Cronkite, but...", if you can believe it! I did a hell of a lot of writing in those 33 years!

And as we both know, DJ's love to hang around to get points with the PD, GM, or in my case, the station owner, who made Arthur Carlson look like a Sunday School superintendent with some of his publicity antics. (No turkey drop, however!) Truth was, the owner was THE program director, and I pretty much followed what the boss said.

Finally, this is the topper: Until we actually moved to a high-rise building in 1989, I worked at what was essentially a cluster of old mobile homes threaded together. One trailer served as the production room. The AM studio was on one side of another trailer; the FM studio was cheek-by-jowl to the AM studio, with a sliding window for a pass-through from one side to the other. Across from the AM studio was a second studio that was used for both AM and FM (at the time AM was first country, then all-talk; the FM was a hodge-podge of gospel music, recorded preachers, foreign-language broadcasts, and sports. The AM station was daytime-only until 1980!)

The upshot of it was that our secretary looked and sounded like Jennifer Marlowe's grumpy old maiden aunt--and she used to tell me that I should write some scripts and send them in to 'WKRP." I don't think even they would have believed them!

I'm sure a real radio station was different in many ways, but WKRP was very entertaining.