I wasn’t planning on writing anything on the anniversary of John Lennon’s death. I figured there would be plenty of other voices on the InterWebs this week paying tribute and remembering, and anyway I honestly didn’t think I had much to say about the subject because, as crappy as this is going to sound, John Lennon just doesn’t mean that much to me.

Please don’t start sharpening your pitchforks and lighting up the torches. I really don’t mean to be offensive or insensitive. John’s murder was a horrific act that hurt thousands, if not millions, of people, and there’s no question that he was a talented man who wrote some genuinely great and immensely popular songs. But when it comes right down to it, I respect the music of John Lennon and The Beatles far more than I actually enjoy it. It’s been overexposed to such a huge degree that the only emotion I experience when I hear most of it is weariness. I don’t really dislike The Beatles. I’m just tired of hearing them every time I turn on the radio, not to mention hearing about how damn great they were.

However, at some point while I was reading all those other blog posts about what happened 30 years ago, I had a sort of epiphany. I remembered something related to John Lennon that does mean a great deal to me, something he did not create directly but which depends on his best-known solo recording, “Imagine,” to achieve its impact. I’m talking about — and this may sound a little strange — one of my favorite episodes of the old TV series WKRP in Cincinnati.

If you’re too young to have seen it or otherwise don’t know it, WKRP was a workplace-oriented sitcom set in a rock-and-roll radio station. As with many sitcoms of the late ’70s and early ’80s, it evolved away from being purely comedic as it went along, and many of the most memorable episodes made very serious points. The show was one of my favorites when I was a kid, and it had a big influence on my developing view of the world. Either that, or it resonated with my pre-existing temperament. It’s sometimes hard to say which way that goes. In any event, there are a number of subjects that I still find myself illustrating through a remembered WKRP gag or plotline, even though I haven’t actually seen the show in years.

One such idea is censorship, and this is where John Lennon and “Imagine” come in. WKRP‘s third season closed with an episode called “Clean Up Radio Everywhere,” in which a religiously motivated lobbying group pressures the station to stop playing songs that this group finds obscene. The station’s manager, Mr. Carlsen, is basically conservative and no fan of rock music, so he readily agrees with this group’s demands at first. But then the group demands more songs be stricken from the playlists, and when Andy Travis, the station’s program director, calls it censorship, Carlsen reluctantly agrees and goes to confront the leader of this morality group.

Carlsen has the other man read the lyrics to “Imagine” and then asks him if that song would be okay to play. The man says no, it’s obscene because it says there’s no heaven and therefore no god. Carlsen replies, “No, it doesn’t say that. It says imagine there’s no heaven. Big difference.”

This was an incredible lesson to my younger self in the power of nuance and the true motivations of many who claim to have society’s best interests at heart, but are really only trying to push their morals on everyone else. A lesson also in the importance of defending freedom of expression even if you, personally, dislike what’s being expressed. This was, for me, a very, very profound and influential half-hour of television… and it all hinged on John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

It’s possible WKRP‘s writers could have found another song to illustrate the point. But I honestly can’t think of any that would have done it so elegantly and so perfectly.