MAS*H did have an episode without a laugh track, pioneering for a comedy. It is the episode where Frank, Radar, Hawkeye and maybe one or two others take a bus and end up in North Korean territory. A North Korean turns himself in and fixes the bus. I remember that Frank was stashing away Hershey bars.
I can’t remember more than that about the particular episode.
What really hurt MAS*H and caused it to lose its bite was the end of the Viet Nam war. And when Major Burns left the show. He represented the Army incompetence that the show thrived on.
I loved MASH*, but it went on for so many years, the actors ended up being much too old for their characters. By the time Gary Burghoff/Radar left, for example, he must have been the oldest corporal in the army. And those “young doctors,” by the time they got sent home, were pretty close to going into semi-retirement, and playing golf two or three days a week.
Other long-running shows often run into the same problem. It certainly happened with Seinfeld, and it’s about to happen with That '70s Show (catch a rerun of an episode from the first season, and look at how young they look!). Only the characters on The Simpsons manage to stay at their assigned ages. I wonder how they do it?
Who knew the Korean War lasted 11 years? I stopped liking the show when Klinger stopped wearing a dress. Also, I hate being preached at, even if I agree with the message.
I loved MAS*H, which ran in primetime from when I was a child until I was in college. I watched the final episode with my entire college choir somewhere in Ohio, where we were on tour. A great memory.
Anyway, I always rationalized that the length of the Korean War was not parallel to real time; that is, the length of time the show was on didn’t necessarily mean we were seeing events chronologically. It was episodic.
And anyway, it was entertaining. As a teen, Alda’s platform introduced me to some ideas, as opposed to vapid entertainment (Charlie’s Angels and Fantasy Island, anyone?).
Mmm mmm mmm. '70s television. I absorbed practically ever ion of it.
Hi! I’m fairly young, and was introduced to MASH by my parents. Right now we don’t get FX to catch the proper reruns, but by carefully rationing out the DVDs (which are awesome, what with the scenes usually removed and the option to dispose of a laught track), they’ve been continuing to watch it. I’m actually a fan of the later episodes, mainly because I thought Winchester was a far more interesting and human character than Burns, whom though decent in the very earliest episodes (like that one where he actually starts getting back at Hawkeye) quickly degraded into a caricature. Margaret also wasn’t a horribly believable character at first, and improved dramatically as the series went on.
I do agree it occasionally gets preachy, but in general, I think it is a very good series.
Can anyone tell me why the first season DVD set’s second disc has a picture of BJ Hunnicut on it? Any why the picture on the first disc is of an OLDER Houlihan (when she had white hair)? The Hawkeye on the other disc may also be an older version… it’s kinda hard to tell though.
It was consistently well-written throughout its run, if heavy-handed at times. I don’t know about best sitcom, but it was certainly one of the best. Along with Cheers and Seinfeld, it sits high on the heap.
The episode during the Blake/Trapper seasons that entirely took place in the OR didn’t have a laugh track. It’s the one where they are so backed up that when Sidney shows up for their card game they make him scrub in. It’s one of my favorite episodes and to me proves that the laugh track was unnecessary. That’s one of the strongest episodes from a writing and acting standpoint.
I want the DVD sets of at least the first three season since those are my favorites, and I want to compare the rest of the series without the laugh track. I still enjoy most of the later seasons, but by the time they got to the “dream” episode and Winchester and Klinger (who seemed to live in that Mudhens jersey for the last couple of seasons) fussing like an old married couple the show was clearly past its peak.
MASH* was part of a new movement of US sitcoms that pushed limits in the 70s. All In The Family has been mentioned, but shows like Maude, Good Times, and Barney Miller. While I still enjoy it, Barney Miller has not held up as well as the other series mentioned.
I grew up watching them both, and would now much rather tune into Barney Miller than I would MASH. I think that Miller’s changes in character retained much more of the flavor and interest of the early seasons, as opposed to MASH, which frequently went off in very odd and unreal directions toward the end.
I didn’t care for “MAS*H” the movie and wasn’t crazy about the novel by Richard Hooker, but I LOATHED the TV series. It was a lot like Alan Alda himself: smug, overly impressed with itself, and rather cowardly.
Richard Hooker was not an anti-war liberal. On the contrary, he was a very conservative, patriotic American. He simply wasn’t the kind of patriot who ignored the dark, grim, and absurd sides of war. He described what he saw in Korea as accurately as he could, SOMETIMES with both gruesome and hilarious results. Hooker didn’t care whom he offended, and that was part of the novel’s small charm: no matter who you are, no matter what you believe in, and no matter what you hold sacred, there’s SOMETHING in Hooker’s book that will outrage you. And, to a lesser extent, that’s true of Robert Altman’s film, too.
But the TV series was wimp-ified beyond redemption.
No, that was just a temporary thing. A sergeant from I-Corps owed Hawkeye after a poker game and offered him a promotion, which ended up going to Radar. Radar decided he didn’t like being a lieutenant and at the end of the episode he asked to be a normal corporal again.
Truth be told, I couldn’t quite remember whether Radar got promoted (for real) before he left the series. Trivia time for the rest of you: which characters, if any, did get promoted during the course of the series?
