M*A*S*H --7/11/25

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Today's selection--from The Platinum Age of Television by David Bianculli. The 1970s television phenomenon—M*A*S*H, based on the subversive 1970 Robert Altman movie of the same name:

 “On television, M*A*S*H lasted for eleven years—nearly four times as long as the Korean War itself, a North-South conflict stretching from 1950 to 1953. It was a Top 10 show for most of its run, and won eleven Emmys, including one for Outstanding Comedy Series (in 1974) and several for its star, Alan Alda, and other cast members. Alda played Hawkeye Pierce, the role played by Donald Sutherland in the Altman film: a gifted surgeon, assigned to the 4077th, who shared Groucho Marx's screen tendencies of a quick wit, a fondness for women, and a contempt for authority. Hawkeye reserved even more contempt for the war itself and complained about its futility even as he stitched up its boyish victims, helicoptered in straight from the front.

“That was what made M*A*S*H so different and so important. When it premiered in 1972, the United States was still embroiled in the highly divisive Vietnam War. But because it was set two decades in the past, in Korea, M*A*S*H was able not only to dramatize war but to speak out against it, making it an antiwar comedy, and a very popular one, even as the country was fighting yet another war. Exteriors were shot at Malibu Creek State Park, where an extensive series of tents and helicopter landing sites was constructed, adding to the overall verisimilitude. The show's many acknowledgements of the seriousness of its wartime subject included the subtle yet significant fact that whenever Hawkeye or any of the other doctors or nurses were tending to a patient in the operating tent, there was no laugh track, no canned laughter. Death was serious business and, in the medical tent scenes especially, so was comedy.

“Without any prompting, several artists interviewed for this book cited M*A*S*H as a seminal show in their own viewing history.

“‘I loved M*A*S*H,’ David E. Kelley says.’You had to watch M*A*S*H,’ Louis C.K. concurs. ‘M*A*S*H was extremely moving and intelligent.' (In his own series, FX's Louie, the comedian did his own stand-alone variation on M*A*S*H: an episode called ‘The Duckling,' in which he unknowingly transports his daughter's pet duckling to a USO tour of Afghanistan.)

Cast just prior to production of Season 2, 1974 (clockwise from left): Loretta Swit, Larry Linville, Wayne Rogers, Gary Burghoff, McLean Stevenson, and Alan Alda

“‘M*A*S*H,’ Aaron Sorkin adds,’is the show, I think, that has informed everything I've ever written. And it's not just me ... Steven Bochco, David Kelley, David Milch—all of us are walking in the footprint left by Larry Gelbart, and here's why.’ He goes on to explain that The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Murphy Brown, while fantastic comedy shows, were not realistic depictions of how a local or national news show was done. M*A*S*H, Sorkin insists, was different.

“No one ever died on McHale's Navy or Hogan's Heroes. War was fun, even in a POW camp. But on M*A*S*H, patients died from time to time. So did doctors. One stunningly unexpected moment came at the end of McLean Stevenson's final appearance as Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake in 1975. All the other members of the 4077th had waved good-bye as Henry's helicopter whisked him off to his plane to return home, only to have Gary Burghoff's Radar O'Reilly, the colonel's loyal assistant, enter the operating tent in the episode's dosing scene to announce that Blake's plane, en route to the United States, had gone down in the Sea of Japan, with no survivors. The doctors and nurses absorbed the news wordlessly, devastated, then returned sadly and silently to their tasks at hand. The news stunned viewers at home just as much. The scene, because it was in the operating room tent, had no laugh track, and no reason for laughter.

“My favorite M*A*S*H episode, though, and the one I consider the most dramatic and daring, was ‘The Interview,' a 1976 episode written and directed by Larry Gelbart. It was fashioned after the fabled CBS reporter Edward R. Murrow's 1952 visit to the Korean War for ‘Christmas in Korea,’ a special installment of his See It Now newsmagazine. In Gelbart's version, the actor Clete Roberts played a Murrow-like reporter visiting the 4077th and asking the doctors, nurses, and other personnel about their wartime experiences. The entire episode, except for the credits, was filmed in black and white, in documentary style. Actors were given leeway to improvise answers to some of the questions posed to them by the reporter, while other answers were carefully and powerfully scripted. The best of the latter, taken from an actual army doctor's recollections, was uttered by William Christopher's Father Mulcahy, the army chaplain. ‘When the doctors cut into a patient--and it's very cold here, you know--steam rises from the body,’ Mulcahy quietly and somberly tells his interviewer. ‘And the doctor will warm himself over the open wound. Could anyone look on that and not feel changed?’

“With characters, episodes, and writing like that, it's no wonder M*A*S*H, by the time it decided to pull up its tent stakes and present an expanded final episode in 1983, had generated an amazing amount of national anticipation. Many critics, including myself, predicted it would become the most viewed scripted TV event of all time, which it was. I was fortunate enough, because of one of those unpredictable perks of being a TV critic, to be among those critics invited to the M*A*S*H set on the 20th Century-Fox studio lot in January 1983 to witness the cast film its last scene of the series, then talk to them. It was a month before the finale would be televised, but that episode had already been shot. The scene we critics were witnessing was from the penultimate episode, held back for this purpose precisely because it included all the main characters, placing items into a time capsule before the war ended officially. There was an air of reverence as the scene was shot, and everyone was drawn into the solemnity of the occasion. Afterward, Alan Alda spoke for everyone when he said, ‘Like M*A*S*H itself, I'm sad and happy at the same time. I'm very sad to be leaving my friends and collaborators, but I'm very happy because I'm so proud of what we've done. We've really accomplished something.’

“A month later, the final episode, ‘Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen' presented the typical (but only for M*A*S*H) mixture of sad and happy. Aida's Hawkeye suffered a nervous breakdown because of the death of an infant, while Jamie Farr's character, Corporal Klinger, who had spent the show's first few seasons wearing a dress in hopes of getting sent home on a psycho­logical discharge, ended up falling in love with a Korean girl, marrying her, and deciding to stay. That final episode attracted 77 percent of all TV viewers that night and earned a Nielsen rating of more than 60--something no Super Bowl has yet done. The A. C. Nielsen audience estimates for the finale approach 125 million viewers, making it the most watched series finale, and most watched scripted TV show period, in television history. Because of audience fragmentation, it's a record that will never be broken.”

author:	David Bianculli
title:	The Platinum Age of Television: From I Love Lucy to The Walking Dead, How TV Became Terrific
publisher:	Anchor
pages:	484-486