Thursday, January 10, 2019

Hamlet in WKRP in Cincinatti

“Les on a Ledge.” By Hugh Wilson. Perf. Gary Sandy, Gordon Jump, Loni Anderson, Richard Sanders, Frank Bonner, and Howard Hesseman. Dir. Asaad Kelada. WKRP in Cincinnati. Season 1, episode 3. CBS. 2 October 1978. DVD. Shout Factory, 2014.
It didn't take long for the exceptional show WKRP in Cincinnati to turn its attention to Shakespeare. In the third episode, Les Nessman (news director, roving reporter, and hog report expert) is banned from the Cincinnati Reds' locker room because a player assumes that he's gay (he's not). He's upset enough to threaten to jump from the building, to recite lines from Hamlet, and to ponder the meaning of the word "fardel."

Here's the key scene:

Links: The Episode at IMDB.

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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

 —The Tempest