Everything I Know About Life, I Learned From Dr. Johnny Fever

Neon Memes • A few weeks ago, my colleague Stefene Russell guffawed at me. "I think you're just projecting," she then remarked. What occasioned her derision? Well, in a context now forgotten, I had just enlightened Stef about the WKRP Paradigm, named after WKRP in Cincinnati, the half-hour sitcom which ran on CBS from 1978 to 1982 and which starred (among others) Loni Anderson as Jennifer Marlowe and Jan Smithers as Bailey Quarters. The paradigm involved relates to a gender-based reaction to those two characters. More specifically, it states that in a sample of any size, an overwhelming plurality of hetero males will find Bailey, the girl-next-door brunette, more appealing that blonde, glamorous Jennifer, and an overwhelming plurality of females will presume exactly the opposite. Now, particularly perspicacious observers of the so-called human condition will detect resonances elsewhere―as with the duality between Tina Louise as Ginger and Dawn Wells as Mary Ann on the 1964–67 CBS farce Gilligan's Island. Still, Stef jeered at me. She jeered at me! I suspect, however, that her tone will change once my paper "The Bailey-Betters-Jennifer Perplex: Erotic Prerogatives as Manifested in Cathode-Ray Tubularity" hits the next issue of the refereed Journal of Television Ethnography. ―Bryan A. Hollerbach, Managing Editor