AfterM*A*S*H: Reschedulings, Hiatuses, and an Important Announcement

We talked a lot in last week's podcast about WKRP's first-season hiatus, retooling, and eventual move to Mondays at 9:30 Eastern, 8:30 Central after M*A*S*H. Of course, WKRP didn't get to enjoy this cushy time slot for long; this was only the first of many moves "up and down the dial" that WKRP experienced in its four-year run. This fantastic WKRP tumblr, "Carlson Industries," run by "Melanie Carlson," gives us a quote from Howard Hesseman from the Toledo Blade in the off-season summer between Seasons 1 and 2:

I’m getting flak now, through my agents, of the most preposterous kind of nonsense coming out of the network.  They’re saying we’re not a hit, we’re not even a marginal hit.  Nor are we a success.  We are a marginal success, due almost totally to the fact that ’M-A-S-H’ is our lead-in.*

It's a timely place for us to note this, because in an attempt to not be as erratic as the suits at the Columbia Broadcasting System, and to give you, our loyal listening audience, a regular and predictable listening experience, we are moving this week to a biweekly release schedule for the podcast.

Our first several episodes were pretty much in the proverbial can by the time we began releasing the podcast, so we had a lot of time to edit (and by "we," I definitely mean "Rob," who did such a stellar job editing our first four episodes). Now that we've burned off that buffer, we're recording and editing as we release, and weekly podcasts are just a little bit ambitious for two dudes whose day jobs demand that we work with other areas of history than just the years 1978 through 1982.

This means we're going to release our next episode, Episode 6 (on "The Contest Nobody Could Win" and "Tornado"), on Wednesday May 13, and then release a new episode every two weeks thereafter. On release weeks, we'll stick to our usual Monday/Wednesday/Friday blog post schedule: Mondays will be a meta-post of some kind, Wednesday will feature the podcast recording, and on Friday you'll get our detailed Show Notes. We may, on our "off weeks," continue to post to the blog observations, notes, and other cool ephemera that we find in our editing and recording processes.

We're totally chuffed at all the attention, feedback, and support we've gotten from all of you out there who love WKRP and have enjoyed our sometimes quite discursive look at it. We want to keep this little engine going and this schedule is our way of giving you a set time to expect our podcast rather than having an erratic, "sometimes weekly, sometimes not" release schedule. Don't forget that you can subscribe directly to our RSS feed using your favorite podcast app (the URL is http://holdmyorderterribledresser.libsyn.com/rss) and then each episode will download automatically as soon as it's released, whether you like it remember or not.

Thanks again, and may the good news, as always, be yours.

* Boy, these actors really loved leaking their gripes about the network, about the audience, and about anything at all to small-town reporters, didn't they? (See also Gordon Jump's quote about Little House in this week's podcast.)