On the DVD audio commentary track for this episode, series creator Hugh Wilson credits Hesseman for largely improvising this entire speech.

Though the format of WKRP is Top 40, Johnny frequently refuses to play any songs off the station playlist, choosing instead to highlight album-oriented rock and old R&B favorites on his own show.

Fever's unorthodox choice of music pays off as the series goes on, and by the final episode he has become the number-one morning DJ in the city.

However, Johnny has his scruples, as when he walks out of a recording session for sports aids when he realized his dialogue is laced with euphemisms for dangerous drug effects.

While it is strongly implied that Johnny is a frequent user of marijuana, he doesn't go in for harder drugs, and leads a campaign to shut down a businessman who is trying to sell speed to teenagers.

He also discovers his brief successor, Doug Winner (Philip Charles MacKenzie) has been accepting cocaine for airplay under a payola scheme with a sleazy record promoter.

However, in the sequel series The New WKRP In Cincinnati, it is established that Johnny never knew his father; his mother, Carrie, was a singer who recorded with Buddy Rich.

After spending most of his life in a nomadic existence "up and down the dial", WKRP settles Johnny down and establishes a relatively stable ensemble of friends and associates for him.

Although the tradeoff is a cramped apartment and low pay, this arrangement doesn't seem to overly concern him much (at one point he describes himself as "a 40-year-old man who lives like a college student").

In the first-season episode, "Fish Story", he shows a near superhuman resistance to the effects of alcohol, apparently building up a high tolerance after years of heavy drinking.

He is often seen wearing a Black Death Malt Liquor T-shirt, designed by Rip Off Press underground comic artist Dave Sheridan.

He later (season three's "Three Days of the Condo") gives his daughter the majority of his legal settlement – roughly one year's salary – from the Los Angeles station that fired him for saying "booger".

In the season three episode "Till Debt Do Us Part", Bailey accepts Johnny's offer to join him on a Caribbean vacation (later cancelled by Herb's actions), though she does say she expects separate rooms.

Case in point, in the series finale, "Up And Down The Dial", the latest ratings book lists Johnny as the #1 morning DJ in the Cincinnati market with the station itself now at #6 overall.

Incredulous at her hypocrisy and callous manipulation ("You are telling your own son that you want him to be the general manager of the number one station in the market, and you'd be happier if it was sixteenth!

Later in his WKRP career, Johnny Fever is approached by a female television producer (Mary Frann) to be a TV DJ for her disco program Gotta Dance.

"Rip Tide," Johnny's TV persona, is money-hungry, disco-loving, chummy with Herb Tarlek, and has a very different voice and personality.

He was originally considered for the role of Herb Tarlek, but when he read the pilot script, he decided that Johnny was the part he really wanted.

Hesseman was also cast as a DJ in the second season, first episode of the 1975 TV show Switch titled "Pirates of Tin Pan Alley".