“Your lead is your most boring character.”
Such as,
Travis on “WKRP in Cincinatti”
Commander Rann of The Micronauts
Arguably Cyclops of the X-Men.
I’m not very familiar with WKRP and have never seen the other shows, but it sounds like you’re talking about the lead character being a Straight Man. He’s the guy that sets up the jokes.
Here’s the trope for Straight Man, see if it fits.
Also, keep in mind, this has been around forever, it’s nothing new.
Possibly Only Sane Employee. Live TV examples include Andy, Dave Nelson from News Radio, and Liz Lemon from 30 Rock.
Alex Rieger on Taxi, maybe? He was a great character and dominated a lot of storylines, but was the only one who wasn’t quirky.
Is there a name for this trope?
If there isn’t, I propose we name it after Bob Newhart.
“Me, I’m a cab driver. I’m the only cab driver here.”
Actually, the normal person surrounded by nuts was a staple of TV in the 70s. *The Mary Tyler Moore Show *was like that too. MTM was very charismatic, but she was boring. She had only one fault, and it was that she gave bad dinner parties.
The idea was that people in general in the 60s and early 70s saw themselves as sane people surrounded by insanity, and would identify with people like MTM, Andy, etc. But there was a shift in the late 70s-early 80s, and people started wanting to see themselves as quirky and outliers-- they didn’t want to be Andy, they wanted to be Johnny Fever. You see shifts in long running shows like Taxi, where the show shifted from being centered on Alex, to focusing once a week on each of the other characters, and even making Alex a little quirkier, while at the same time making Louie more likeable, and Latka a fleshed-out character, not a stereotype. MASH* as well, with the softening of MAJ Houlihan, and the replacement for MAJ Burns being annoying, but not a hatesink, while the show became more of an ensemble, and less of “Hawkeye in Korea.”
Soap was the first true 80s show, albeit it came out in 1977: everyone was quirky; people weren’t quite ready for it, and even though it has a cult following, it didn’t have a long run. St. Elsewhere tried the same formula in 1982 with more success.
Barney Miller, a popular Seventies sitcom, the titular character would fit the trope as well. He was an island of normalcy in the sea of lunacy. RivkahChaya may be onto something here. 
I don’t think I’d include MASH* as an example of this trope though. Hawkeye and Trapper John were the main characters at the onset and they were definitely “wacky”. True, one or both of them often had to present the voice of reason in the face of whatever absurdity they were combating, but their own antics and reckless behavior sort of belies any claim to Andy Travis-ness. Also, Larry Linville got tired of playing Frank Burns, I don’t think the producers wanted to lose that character, and I don’t think the viewers were happy to see him go either. The other characters changed a lot over the years, true, but a lot of that was the cast deciding they wanted more depth and relevance. That’s the impression I got from interviews I’ve seen of the cast members, anyway, particularly Loretta Swit and Alan Alda.
Soap was unfortunately ahead of its time, like you say. Wish it had lasted at least as long as its spin-off. Speaking of which, there’s another Seventies era example of the trope in question; Benson DuBois.
If you’re talking about MASH, I would have to go with Radar as being the sane one in a sea of crazy. As far as the trope goes, I agree with Vanilla Protagonist.
Well, actually, MAS*H changed style, from farce to comedy, or really to what was known in the 80s as “dramedy.” The characters we more 2-dimensional to begin with. The shift happened, I think, because the show started when the Vietnam War was still going on, and it was really about that, but once the war ended, the show became more of a generic workplace show, and less of a commentary on the current situation.
It’s true that Linville wanted to leave the show, but my point was that he wasn’t replaced with an equally dislikable character.
I thought Father Mulcahy was the main sane guy over there, though Hawekeye was the protagonist and was not a boring dude.
I think “Vanilla Protagonist” is the closest. It isn’t that the character is “The only sane man”…it’s that (even if you don’t compare him to everyone else) he/she is flat out boring.
Of course this would be in varying degrees. IMO it’s problematic with WKRP. At least Barney Miller is somewhat charming and Alex has that dry, Jewish humor thing going. Though I don’t think the character is Jewish
I haven’t seen Babylon 5, but would Commander Sinclair qualify?
He could be kind of bland at times, but Sinclair had a lot of personal issues going on, what with his raging case of Survivor’s Guilt, amnesia, and what not from his time in the previous war. Compared to Garibaldi and Ivanova though, Sinclair could tend to get overshadowed at times. Given that he largely seemed to serve to arbitrate disputes between other parties (often this meaning Londo and G’Kar), I say he might qualify.
No, he is. He has a Jewish last name, and Simka once lectures him when he criticizes something her religious leader has advised her to do by saying something like “Do we criticize you for not eating pork? Your leaders realized thousands of years before the discovery of trichinosis that not eating pork was healthy,” then she makes a point about her leaders knowing that a married couple with problems can’t reconcile until one has experienced the same pain that the other inflicted. I suppose Alex could be Muslim, but Rieger doesn’t sound like a Muslim name.
Trivia: the actors who played Latka and Simka are both Jewish, and Latka and Simka are Yiddish words. “Latka” is a dialectic variant on the word that means “potato pancake,” or actually something more like a hash brown. Simka is from the Hebrew word “Simcha,” and means “happy occasion.”
I think that 2001: A Space Odyssey has something like this going on. The most “human” character is the computer, while the actual humans are fairly bland.
Many comedies fall in to one of two types: 1) The sane man in a crazy world and B) the crazy man in a sane world.
WKRP, Taxi, Newhart fall into category 1.
Mork, Monk, Alf fall into category B.
In the series MASH, Col Potter was the sane man.