Wednesday, September 7, 2016

HMOTD 027: All the Men in Landersville are Going Bald


We're back! Season 3 of HMOTD begins with the WKRP episodes "The Airplane Show" and "Jennifer Moves," plus actors' strikes, hamster voices, suburban ghosts, and the busting of same.
(Full show notes appear at Hold My Order, Terrible Dresser two days after each episode is released. All audio clips are the properties of their owners/creators and appear in this work of comment and critique under fair use provisions of copyright law.)

Check out this episode!

6 comments:

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  2. The "haunting of the suburbs" discussion got me thinking.

    The idea that the suburb is full of secret weirdos had been around for a while. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I think, can be read as a reaction to planned communities like Levittown springing up in the post-War years. In the 1950s, for all that TV still had its traditional suburban families, you also had civil rights issues being obliquely addressed in the form of witches, martians, macabre weirdos, and supernatural creatures living in the suburbs, with the antagonists being their intolerant, busybody neighbors.

    The idea of a typically pretty progressive sitcom like WKRP depicting suburban weirdos as the antagonists feels *very* Reagan-era.

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    1. 1950s and 1960s, I should have said.

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    2. Kevin: Yes, absolutely. I think we talked a while back about how the "Silver Age" sitcoms "made the strange domestic and the domestic strange" - I was thinking about exactly the same martians, witches, weirdos, etc that you are.

      Thanks for commenting - and your icon is absolutely on point!

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  3. Good 1st show for season 3! Next to the horrible Andy's girlfriend episode, Airplane Show is probably my least favorite, and yet you guys managed to make it more interesting than the episode itself ;)

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