R.I.P.: WKRP Creator Hugh Wilson Dead At 74

(Entertainment Weekly photo)

Hugh Wilson, who created the acclaimed sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati and directed and co-wrote the first Police Academy movie, launching a Warner Bros. franchise, has died.

He was 74, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

An Emmy winner and seven-time nominee, Wilson died over the holiday weekend at his home in Albemarle County, Virginia, family friends told CBS News 19 in Charlottesville. No other details were immediately available.

Wilson also directed The First Wives Club (1996), starring Goldie Hawn, Bette Midler and Diane Keaton as women seeking revenge on their ex-husbands, and co-wrote and helmed Guarding Tess (1994), featuring Shirley MacLaine as a first lady and Nicolas Cage as a Secret Service agent trying to protect her.

Wilson wrote and directed two 1999 films that starred Brendan Fraser, Blast From the Past and Dudley Do-Right, and penned the screenplay for Hal Needham's Stroker Ace (1983), starring Burt Reynolds and his future wife Loni Anderson, one of the breakout stars of WKRP.

WKRP in Cincinnati, set at a rock radio station in the Ohio city, ran for four seasons on CBS from 1978-82. It starred Howard Hesseman and Tim Reid as deejays Johnny Fever and Venus Flytrap, respectively; Gary Sandy and Gordon Jump as station execs; Richard Sanders as the mousey newsman Les Nessman; and Anderson as WKRP's comely receptionist. The station call letters were a pun on "W-crap."

Wilson was a writer at MTM Enterprises and at work on The Tony Randall Show when he approached MTM head Grant Tinker about an idea for another comedy, one that was based on his experience as a sales executive at a Top 40 radio station in Atlanta.

"I told Grant, and we went over to CBS, and they all said, 'Yeah, hey, great,'" Wilson said in a 2012 oral-history discussion about one of the series' finest episodes, "Turkeys Away," on the Classic TV History blog.

"What was lucky for me was that most of those guys … had at one time or another been in the radio business. I hadn’t counted on having that kind of built-in affection for the idea.

"The character of Johnny Fever, he was based on a guy I knew in Atlanta called Skinny Bobby Harper. That was funny, because he was the morning guy, so Skinny had to get up at 4 in the morning to get in there. But he also loved being in the bars at night. He was like Fever. In the pilot, I said [to Hesseman], 'You've got to play it like you're sleepwalking, because you should be asleep by 8, but 8 is just when you're going out."



Probably because it was shifted 12 times on the CBS schedule, WKRP — always a critical darling — had trouble finding a sizable network audience. However, it became a huge hit in first-run syndication after its original airing and spawned The New WKRP in Cincinnati, which aired another two years on local stations.

Hugh Hamilton Wilson was born on Aug. 21, 1943, in Miami. He attended the University of Florida and graduated in 1964 with a degree in journalism.