Les is prominently featured in WKRP's most famous episode, "Turkeys Away" (season 1, episode 7), in which he reports on what turns into a disastrous station promotion, evoking Herbert Morrison's emotional description of the 1937 Hindenburg disaster. This scene is widely acknowledged to be one of the funniest moments in television history. In an apparent in-joke reference to Alfred Hitchcock's movie "The Birds" in which a near victim is trapped by birds in a phone booth, Nessman saves himself from being ganged up on by the turkeys by taking refuge in a phone booth. A running gag is that Nessman's reporting ends in disaster: in "The Airplane Show" episode, Nessman is taken "hostage" by a crazy veteran pilot who wants to draw attention to peoples' indifference to Veterans Day.