You also see the timeline issue in the Patrick O’Brien books, in which Aubrey and Maturin wander around the Pacific for what seems like a decade. O’Brien admitted he’d basically added extra years to the calendar to extend their adventures.
Court-martial.
By the way and IIRC, the TV show was merely set during the Korean War; it was actually more about the issues related to the Vietnam War.
It could have been 5 O’Clock Charlie.
Ran across a quote from Maclean Stevenson the other day -
“The mistake was that I thought everybody in America loved McLean Stevenson. That was not the case. Everybody loved Henry Blake. So if you go and do ‘The McLean Stevenson Show,’ nobody cares about McLean Stevenson.”
re: the surprise attached to Blake’s death
The way I heard (i.e., read) it at the time was that Stevenson’s leaving the show was completely amicable, and the powers that be/were simply let Blake go home. But once he left, Stevenson began bad-mouthing the show in the press, so they wrote and filmed the tag in which we learned the plane had been shot down.
Sorry, no cites. But that’s how I remember it.
Of course, in the days before VCR’s, and with constant reruns and syndicationwere a staple of (and moneymaker for) any show, basically there tended not to be a timeline. Once in a while new characters showed up, or actors were switched, but generally each episode was designed to stand on its own. It was a major change to switch to an episodic series with a storyline.
the fear was that if someone missed the first few episodes they might not continue to tune in as they were lost as to what was happening; whereas a sitcom, you could tune in to the same familiar characters and see what hijinks they got up to this week regardless of their past history.
Perhaps the main exception was soap operas, but they always had several story arcs starting and stopping over and over, and as my experience has taught me (thanks to my wife) soap operas tend to have many bits where the characters fill each other in on the story so far for those who missed it.
“Are you still mad because I slept with you wife after you burned down the hospital and had to leave town?”
“No, but I had to come back when I found that Tammy was actually Jane’s long lost identical twin and she was bent on revenge for when Sam killed Jane.”
There’s also the pathos of having him killed just as he is about completely out of the war zone.