‘WKRP in Cincinnati’s ‘Turkeys Away’ Episode Was Based on Real-Life Thanksgiving Disaster

The funniest sitcom episode about Thanksgiving didn’t come from Friends, though God knows they tried every year. The undisputed champ is ‘Turkeys Away,’ from the first season of WKRP in Cincinnati. That episode chronicles the most disastrous promotion in radio history, and, amazingly, it was based on a real-life stunt gone wrong. 

WKRP’s creator, Hugh Wilson, was an ad guy who'd worked with plenty of radio stations, bringing a treasure trove of stories to the table as the show began. He also camped at a rock station in Atlanta, spending time in each department so he’d really understand its inner workings. That’s where he heard a story from station manager Jerry Blum, one of the inspirations for WKRP’s Big Guy, Mr. Carlson. 

Blum told Wilson “about a promotion – I believe in Texas, and I want to say Dallas, but I’m not sure – in which he threw turkeys out of a helicopter, and they didn’t fly,” Wilson says in an oral history published on The Classic TV History Blog. “They crashed to the ground, it was just a horrible disaster, and he wound up losing his job over it.”

It was not only a crazy story, but a perfect sitcom plot. “Jerry, I think you just won me an Emmy,” Wilson said.

There are different versions of the story, but everyone agrees it happened. “It was at a shopping center in Atlanta,” remembered Clarke Browne, the model for tacky salesman Herb Tarlek.  “We thought that we could throw these live turkeys out into the crowd for their Thanksgiving dinners.  All of us, naïve and uneducated, thought that turkeys could fly.  Of course, they went just fuckin’ splat.”

It was Wilson’s idea to have newsman Les Nesman cover the tragic promotion as if it were the Hindenburg disaster. “Something just came out of the back of the helicopter. It’s a dark object, perhaps a skydiver plummeting to the earth from only 2,000 feet in the air. A second, a third … there’s no parachutes yet … Oh my God, they’re turkeys! They’re crashing to the earth right in front of our eyes! One just went through the windshield of a parked car!”

Chaos reigns in the shopping center parking lot as Nesman hits full panic mode. “Oh, the humanity! The turkeys are hitting the ground like bags of wet cement! The crowd is running for their lives!”

Somehow, the disaster wasn’t even the show’s funniest scene. That came over the end credits, when station manager Carlson and sales guy Tarlek returned from the shopping center covered in small feathers.

“As God as my witness,” says a visibly shaken Carlson, “I thought turkeys could fly.”

Actor Gordon Jump made it work, “one of the nicest men that ever lived, really, he truly was,” said Gary Sandy, who played program director Andy Travis. Viewers felt his pain because “he was just a great human being.” 

The episode aired as WKRP was floundering in the ratings, so much so that the sitcom was pulled from the air to be tweaked. “‘Turkeys’ saved us from getting cancelled, because it got a lot of talk,” said Wilson. “I meet people for the first time … and it somehow comes up that I created WKRP, they immediately start saying, ‘As God is my witness, I didn’t know turkeys could fly.’”