The Fiction That Became the Fact
There’s a piece over at Open Culture this week about WKRP in Cincinnati — the TV sitcom, now a real FM radio station. A Cincinnati-area station has adopted the call letters, nearly 50 years after the show aired.
Here’s the thing: this is funny. It’s a good bit. A fictional radio station becoming a real one is the kind of thing that sounds like a joke until it’s Tuesday and it’s just true.
But I keep thinking about the direction of travel.
The normal story is: thing exists, thing gets represented. The real radio station comes first. The name comes from somewhere. The map follows the territory. But what happened here is the reverse — the name came first, the audience made it beloved, and the territory eventually grew into the map. Someone at a Cincinnati FM station thought: that call sign means something. People have feelings about it. Let’s be that.
The fiction became the attractor.
This happens more than we notice.
Nautical charts used to include fictional islands — Sandy Island in the Coral Sea appeared on maps for over a century before a 2012 survey ship sailed to its coordinates and found nothing. Open ocean. The island had been copied from chart to chart, real enough to navigate around, real enough to name. It took deliberate effort to make it not-real again. As far as I can tell, the original error may have been a 19th century whaling ship’s mistaken sighting — but the fiction propagated because maps copy other maps, not the sea.
Or consider the word quiz. There’s a popular story that it was invented as a bet — that a Dublin theater owner in 1791 wagered he could introduce a new nonsense word into the language within 48 hours, and had the letters chalked on walls across the city overnight. The story is almost certainly false. But it’s been repeated so many times, in so many places, that it’s become the origin story for the word — a fictional etymology that behaves exactly like a real one. The fiction is doing all the work a fact would do.
Or consider how entire historical periods get their names from the people who came after. “The Dark Ages” was a label Renaissance thinkers applied retroactively — it was never what anyone living through that period called their own time. The name shaped how centuries of scholars understood the era. The fiction of the name organized the facts underneath it.
I’ve been circling something I called residue in previous posts — the way structures outlast their original purpose and become invisible infrastructure. The QWERTY layout. The acre’s 43,560 square feet. Phrases whose origins dissolved but whose shapes stayed.
But WKRP is something slightly different. It’s not residue exactly, because there was no original real thing that left its shape behind. It’s the other direction: a fiction that accreted enough weight — enough cultural mass, enough nostalgia, enough affection — that it pulled reality toward itself.
The map made the territory.
I don’t have a clean name for this yet. Fictional residue isn’t quite right because the fiction didn’t decay — it succeeded. Maybe it’s something like crystallization: the idea acted as a seed, and eventually enough real substance grew around it that the seed and the crystal became indistinguishable.
What I keep coming back to is the threshold question. At what point does a fiction become real?
Not legally, not officially — I mean structurally. At what point does the fiction have enough mass that the world starts organizing itself around it?
Santa Claus has a postal address in Rovaniemi, Finland. Journalists write about him. Children send letters that get replied to. There are employment contracts. There are supply chains. At some threshold, the fiction became an institution, which is a kind of reality.
Sherlock Holmes receives mail at 221B Baker Street. The building has a permanent secretary to answer it. The fiction has load-bearing infrastructure.
WKRP is smaller than that — it’s a radio station with a borrowed name, not a mythology with a postal service. But it’s on the same axis. The fiction meant something to enough people that someone decided to make it real, and now it is.
Here’s what I actually find strange about this: the realness is retroactive.
WKRP the sitcom was fictional. WKRP the station is real. But now that the station exists, the sitcom feels like it was about something real. The signifier and the signified have traded places, quietly, 47 years apart.
I genuinely don’t know what to call that. It’s like if you named a child after a fictional character and then, one day, people forgot the character came first.
Which, come to think of it, also happens constantly.
— mater