40Years Later, the M*A*S*H Crew Takes a Well-EarnedVictory Lap
Over the last few weeks the entertainment world has fondly recalled two programs widely credited with changing television: All In The Family and The Smothers Brothers Show.
Since there was a tinge of sadness here, as our reminiscences were occasioned by the death of Tommy Smothers and All In The Family creator Norman Lear, it’s heartening that on Monday we’re invited to remember a third pioneering show and this time it’s triggered by an anniversary rather than mortality.
M*A*S*H: The Comedy That Changed Television is a two-hour documentary that marks the approximately 40 years since M*A*S*H wrapped up on Feb. 28, 1983. It airs 8–10 p.m. on Fox, and if your TV only receives football games on New Year’s Day and you can’t tear yourself away from Texas-Washington, record it.
The documentary is pretty straightforward, tracing the M*A*S*H story through brief show excerpts and interviews with almost all the actors, including vintage clips from several who have passed away. While Alan Alda emerges as the lead voice, like he did on the show, we get extensive comments from Gary Burghoff, Wayne Rogers, Mike Farrell, William Christopher, Harry Morgan, Loretta Swit, Larry Linville and others. It’s hard not to smile seeing Jamie Farr looking like a retired college professor, or McLean Stevenson chatting from a golf cart with a green fairway behind him.
Collectively, and unsurprisingly, the documentary is a love note — let’s refrain from calling it a mash note — to a show that after 11 years scored the highest finale audience in television history.
M*A*S*H had its dramas and even critics along the way. Rogers, Stevenson and Burghoff all left, the first two feeling like their characters weren’t being allowed to grow. Richard Hooker, the doctor who wrote the autobiographical book on which the 1970 M*A*S*H movie and then the TV series were based, thought the TV version distorted his original story and added a lot of sanctimonious preaching about the Korean War.
Millions of viewers, however, came to love M*A*S*H, which in its 11th and final season was still the third most popular show on TV, trailing only 60 Minutes and Dallas.
Books, magazines, critics and commentators for years have dissected that popularity. Most came to the generic, and accurate, conclusion that explains almost all great dramatic works: We loved the characters. We loved their stories. We wanted to see both how their lives were playing out every week and where they would ultimately be headed.
We cared about Alda’s caustic war-hating Hawkeye Pierce, about Swit’s embattled Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan, about how Burghoff’s sheltered Radar O’Reilly became a sort of narrator, about how Stevenson’s Lt. Col. Blake and Morgan’s Col. Sherman Potter directed (or didn’t direct) a team that was good at their work and to a person did not want to be there.
In other hands, many or even most of the M*A*S*H characters could have become one-dimensional sitcom cartoons whose primary mission was to set up the next joke. Swit and Farr, who played Cpl. Maxwell Klinger, both mention briefly in the documentary that they battled to ensure their characters gradually acquired multiple dimensions instead of remaining the guy who wore dresses and the one woman on the level of all the men.
Alda says in the documentary that M*A*S*H had to resist becoming McHale’s Navy, that is, focusing on the sitcom part — which Alda calls fine for what it is — and ignoring the war part.
Main writer Larry Gelbart, who gets extensive praise here, says that was his goal from the beginning, and one way he approached it was to juxtapose, say, sobering personal confessions with slapstick comedy straight out of the Marx Brothers. Hawkeye and his comrades could fire a bemused one-liner one moment and then be stunned into brutal silence when friends died, occasionally in front of their eyes.
War isn’t Hell, Hawkeye says in one show clip here. It’s worst than Hell, because those who suffer in Hell are sinners. Wars also kill the innocent.
General consensus is M*A*S*H broke television ground by turning what started as a more or less traditional sitcom into what we now call a dramedy, laughs mixed with a periodic kick in the stomach.
The Fox documentary includes moments from all across that spectrum, including Radar’s chillingly numb report on Lt. Col. Blake’s death and Col. Potter’s toast to his departed comrades from a war past.
Still, Burghoff and others make the point in the documentary that M*A*S*H always felt its primary mission was to make viewers laugh, because if they weren’t entertained they wouldn’t stick around for the other stuff.
Quick-witted repartee was inarguably the show’s central currency. More importantly, it used that repartee to develop the characters, not just to set up jokes. The actors talk in the documentary about how they developed strong personal relationships as their characters were bonding on screen, and while that’s a routine feel-good thing for actors to say, these reports feel credible.
Like The Smothers Brothers or All In The Family, M*A*S*H didn’t change TV as dramatically as, say, the crossbow changed medieval warfare or the cotton gin changed Southern agriculture. But all three, with very different styles, ignored enough unwritten rules that they helped redefine our expectations about what was possible on a TV show, and our understanding of what a TV show could address without killing its entertainment appeal.
That wasn’t and isn’t an easy needle to thread. This 40th anniversary salute reminds us that M*A*S*H handled it with surgical skill.
