Well, I still have that idea for a series set at that Radar Station in Alaska where they send all the screwups, smartass hotshots, and guys who knew too much…
Gomer Pyle took place during the Vietnam war.
The lead character in that show was an Iraq War veteran who had PTSD. It didn’t come up a lot but it was an underlying element of the show, which I liked.
But one of the most important points about MAS*H was that the principals were all draftees, not professional military. (Yeah, I’m excluding Margaret and Potter for the moment.) They could make fun of Blake and Burns because they clearly had no business being there in the first place.
Today a senior officer is a career soldier who chose that way of life and worked through the ranks. It’s far more risky to make someone like that a buffoon like Blake or Burns.
If you aren’t sanctimoniously pro-military, you will get flak from right-wingers.
If you aren’t sanctimoniously anti-war, you will get flak from left-wingers.
I’m not sure there are enough people in the middle to allow a show to find an audience.
Re: Dad’s Army is 37% at Rotten Tomatoes. It’s gotten some really nasty reviews.
Opening weekend (week+ ago) in the UK was $3M, a decent enough amount. (Similar to how Ride Along 2 did there.) But I don’t expect it to make any dough in the US, let alone any non-Anglophile country.
It will hurt, rather than help the genre.
The US is too war-weary to get into this now. It’s not like during the Viet Nam days when people still had hope that our wars were going to end soon in victory.
I see that the HBO comedy The Brink with Jack Black which had some military elements has been mentioned. But the military part was secondary. The main part was diplomatic/political. It was renewed for a 2nd season and HBO soon after decided to cancel it instead.
Yeah they were hitting on a lot of important issues but weren’t too preachy. Unfortunately iirc it really wasn’t given a chance. Moved around a lot and not given a chance.
Major Dad may or may not belong on this list. It always struck me as less a service comedy and as more a domestic/family sitcom where the father’s job happened to be the Marine Corps. There were none of the fish-out-of-water-recruit or isn’t-the-military-silly type of jokes that you tended to get in traditional service comedies. And although it took place partially during the first Gulf War, that was rarely mentioned, apart from a single episode where the family was worried about whether the Major would have to deploy to a combat zone (spoiler alert: he didn’t). Rather, most of the humor (such as it was) came from the Major’s disconnect at the sort of no-nonsense command style he used in the Marines not working within the very different dynamic of a family of growing girls.
Again, by this time the military was all-volunteer, and the Major was a career Marine, as were most of his co-workers. They were all there because they wanted to be there, and were mostly portrayed as competent, professional people. Oh, they had their sitcom-style foibles: The young lieutenant was painfully earnest and a bit naive, the general was old-fashioned and kind of slow on the uptake. But none of them were ever portrayed as the sort of incompetent boob that a Frank Burns was, or the sort of lazy, wheedling con-man that a Sergeant Bilko was. Either view of the military would have seemed wildly out of place on that show.
Writing this makes me realize, slightly to my horror, that I know an awful lot more about Major Dad than I would have liked.
Military physicians get commissioned officer rank (Captain in the Army/Air Force, Lt Commander in the Navy) right off the bat, and a lot only signed up to pay for medical school without any intention of going career after their contracts up. IIRC this is true for a lot of nurses and other medical personnel too. A lot of room for humor there.
MAS*H was pretty successful.
MASH*** began in 1972, when the US was still in Vietnam. Of course, it continued until well after the war ended.
Back in the '80s, there was a Private Benjamin series, and one called At Ease, which lasted only 14 episodes.
Guys…The A-Team?
Granted, that was like 20 years ago.
The important point about MASH was that the principals were doctors, making it a medical comedy/drama, of which there are plenty on TV. Much of the comedy came from the fact that these were unorthodox, but highly skilled doctors with a legitimate desire to help people, juxtaposed over the absurdity and horror of having to do this as part of the bureaucratic rear echelon logistics chain of an active duty US Army in the middle of the Korean War. Blake and Burns could be buffoons because their pompous buffoonery was largely confined to the relatively safe environment of the 4077th MASH behind the lines. Make it a front line paratrooper battalion and it’s a lot less funny (i.e. Lt Dike from Band of Brothers).
I’m not really sure how you would make a military comedy in this day and age. There are/were plenty of military dramas (JAG, NCIS, Army Wives, The Unit, Pensacola: Wings of Gold). Sometimes they have comedic elements in them. There are political comedies like VEEP or The Brink that sometimes have military plot elements. I just don’t see how you would create a “Brooklyn Nine-nine” about the military. “Oops! I blew off Sarge’s foot with a Claymore mine! Sporgie Dorg!” Or would they just make another dumb show about the biggest bunch of misfits in the Army and their big hearted con-man of an NCO and his endless conflicts with the by the book base commander?
Damn straight. There is a segment of the population that thinks that the military is infallible, that no serviceman ever did anything wrong, and that the only proper way to look at the troops is with fawning adoration.
More like 30.
Watching the series, you would never have guessed there was a war going on the whole time. :smack:
FOX showed the episodes out of the order in which they were produced, thereby destroying any continuity:
I’m guessing only a very small percentage of today’s potential viewers lived through a war.
Bluestone 42 is exactly the kind of show the OP was thinking about. It’s very much a MASH for our times. It’s British, of course. It’s also really good.
I think Simplicio hit on something by bringing up conscription. A military comedy when there’s a draft makes fun of “us.” When there isn’t a draft, it would have to make fun of “them.” Our all-volunteer military creates a situation where large numbers of people feel they owe a debt of gratitude to those in the armed forces. It would be hard to do a military comedy today without making it seem like civilians were ridiculing the people and institutions they ought to be thanking.