Mr. Hesseman played a fallen radio star who landed in the Midwest on the popular sitcom, which captured the misadventures of a struggling station.
Howard Hesseman, the actor and improvisational comedian best known for playing a stuck-in-the-’60s radio disc jockey in the TV sitcom “WKRP in Cincinnati,” died on Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 81. His wife, Caroline Ducrocq, said he died at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center of complications from colon surgery last summer. Mr. Hesseman received two Emmy nominations for playing Dr. Johnny Fever on “WKRP in Cincinnati,” which ran on CBS for four seasons from 1978 to 1982. The series portrayed a struggling Top 40 rock radio station, where the staff rages against the age of disco with hard rock and punk songs. Mr. Hesseman’s hard-living character, having been pushed from a Los Angeles station where he was a star, serves as a senior member of the counterculture at the Midwestern outlet after smooth-talking his way into a job. “I think maybe Johnny smokes a little marijuana, drinks beer and wine, and maybe a little hard liquor,” Mr. Hesseman told The New York Times in 1979. “And on one of those hard mornings at the station, he might take what for many years was referred to as a diet pill. But he is a moderate user of soft drugs, specifically marijuana.” Johnny Fever was a cherished character on TV who embodied the essential traits of 1960s counterculture: the worship of rock bands; not-so-veiled drug references; long, shaggy hair.
