Les Nessman - Les at WKRP

Les At WKRP

Les is the ludicrously incompetent news director of WKRP and has been with the station since 1954. Knowing next to nothing about sports, he makes several glaring errors, for example mispronouncing golfer Chi Chi Rodriguez's name as "Chy Chy Rod-ri-gweeze" and calling a swimming event "breast stroking."

Les is a five-time winner of the fictitious Ohio radio news trophy, the "Buckeye Newshawk Award," the coveted "Silver Sow Award" (for excellence in farm news, particularly hog reports), and the "Copper Cob Award" (also for farm broadcasting). Sanders explained that the Silver Sow award was invented as a plot device to give Les a reason to ask Jennifer on a date. The award subsequently "tickled the fancy of hog producers across the country."

The episode "Les on a Ledge" is centred around a distraught Les standing outside one of the station's windows in an apparent suicide attempt after he is banned from a men's locker room and accused of being homosexual. The rest of the characters both try to figure the situation out and come to terms with Les' apparent sexuality. Eventually it is revealed that the accusation was a misunderstanding, but Les and the others never decide or reveal what Les' true sexuality is. It is decided, at Jennifer's prompting, that it does not matter whether he is normal or not, and Les' sexuality is left ambiguous.

Les is featured in WKRP's most famous episode, "Turkeys Away", where he reports on a disastrous station promotion using many of the same phrases as Herbert Morrison describing the 1937 Hindenburg disaster. This scene from "Turkeys Away" is widely acknowledged to be one of the funniest moments in television history.

Les longs to "move up" to a higher-paying job as a TV newsman, and in one episode he shows a video tape to his station friends of himself reporting the news; unfortunately for Les, the tape is so cheaply and badly made, that Nessman runs out quite embarrassed. In another episode, Les shows Venus Flytrap how he has been dyeing his skin black — a parody of John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me. When Bailey Quarters is promoted as a reporter, Les is jealous enough to attempt to upstage her by plagiarizing an initial draft of one of her news stories, unaware that it is partially fictional and thus puts the station's broadcast license in jeopardy.

Les works in the WKRP bullpen, a big room with desks for several of the employees. Les believes that as the news director, he should have his own private office, so he puts masking tape on the floor around his desk indicating where walls would be if he had his own office. He insists that anyone who approaches his desk must knock at an imaginary door and wait for permission to come in. He mimes opening and closing a door whenever he sits down at or leaves his desk; once he even took out a set of keys to lock the nonexistent door. All of his colleagues respect his insistence on maintaining his own private space, and play along with his "walls" charade. Mr. Carlson even "knocks" by clicking his heels together, although Jennifer was permitted to ignore the imaginary walls.