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Finally got around to this:
The story line [u:snq8zviw]was[/u:snq8zviw] a bit choppy. Your music complaint doesn't really bother me because I assumed the doc was to be about the radio station rather than on the music per se -- although they went went off in the middle section of the piece to talk about the music as if they felt the need, an hour into the show, to make the case that synth-based R&R deserved defending lest the whole 'Dare to Be Different' format be seen as a novelty.
They also played a bit fast and loose with some facts. I noticed that the station GM, Gerry McNamara, who was so much the central character in the show, was also listed as an executive producer in the credits so
the who thing has the taint of being a bit of an inside job.
-- right at the start they essentially claimed credit for making the launch of MTV possible. First of all I'm not sure I'd brag about that. But even if you wanted to, MTV launched themselves exactly a year and a day [u:snq8zviw]prior to[/u:snq8zviw] WLIR making their vaunted programming change [Aug 1, 1981 vs Aug 2, 1982) so who was copying who here.
- Joan Jett, even the Blackhearts version, was well established in the by 1980 (I heard them via an even smaller radio market in upstate New York) and 'I LOVE ROCK & ROLL' was on the charts through much of 1981, but that didn't stop the WLIR crew from claiming first dibs on her too.
- and then there was the postscript at the end where they claimed that, following the legal troubles with the FCC, 'WLIR never was on the air again'. Total Bullshit. The station came back, under new ownership/mgmt (which is probably why they claim otherwise) almost immediately. Yeah, it was now called WDRE (for 'Dare') but it was the same format with the same DJs at the same frequency on the dial. About the only change was that the 'Weekly Screamer' feature for the week's best new song became the 'Shriek of the Week'. The station didn't officially die until 2004 (not quite the same as the claimed 1987) but I guess McNamara wasn't involved so they pretends that all never happened.
That said, what they were doing at the time was entirely fresh and different from what the big city stations were doing. It wasn't even a case of them zigging while the other zagged, it was them zigging and zagging while the others were standing still. The way the NYC stations ignored the early days of U2, Prince, Clash, etc was borderline criminal. And the sort of cult-ish following that extended to the local clubs and nearby Nassau Coliseum concerts was definitely a real thing.
So it was good to see that story told (and I wasn't even a regular listener) even though it would have been a bit better if told with a more even (and accurate) hand.
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