Fox hails ‘M*A*S*H’ as game-changer
Fox kicks off the New Year with an old-fashioned series retrospective, “M*A*S*H: The Comedy That Changed Television” (8 p.m., TV-PG), a twohour glance at a classic sitcom that aired on CBS from 1972-83, departing before the Fox network came into existence.
The special includes contemporary interviews with surviving series stars Alan Alda (Capt. Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce), Gary Burghoff (Cpl. Walter “Radar” O’Reilly), William Christopher (Father John Patrick Francis Mulcahy), Jamie Farr (Cpl./Sgt. Maxwell Q. “Max” Klinger), Mike Farrell (Capt. B.J. Hunnicutt), Wayne Rogers (Capt. “Trapper” John McIntyre) and Loretta Swit (Maj. Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan). It blends them rather seamlessly with archival footage of network executive Fred Silverman (1937-2020) and writer Larry Gelbart (1928-2009) to recall the series’ inception, development, shaky start and eventual triumph.
Inspired by Robert Altman’s 1970 antiwar screen satire, itself based on a 1968 novel by Richard Hooker and W.C. Heinz, the TV series quickly developed a tone of its own. As Hawkeye, Alda was more breezy and likable than the film character played by an edgier Elliott Gould. At the same time, it tried to blend the movie’s tone of irreverence and absurdity with the realities of combat, casualties and death. As Alda observes, he didn’t want to do another “McHale’s Navy.”
This special is best appreciated as TV history. It recalls an era when three broadcast networks set the agenda and when Saturday night, now a dumping ground for repeats, was home to CBS’s “All in the Family” and eventually “M*A*S*H,” its two toprated series.
Don’t go looking for an “American Experience” approach here, or any effort to put the show in any historical perspective. To anyone who watched it at the time, “M*A*S*H” was a series set in the Korean War (1950-53), but it was really about the Vietnam War, which was in its second decade when the series debuted in 1972. If the word “Vietnam” is mentioned here, I must have missed it.
And it’s almost impossible to understand the characters on “M*A*S*H” without discussing the impact of the military draft on society, most specifically males.
In clips seen here, Alda’s Hawkeye is proud to be a fine surgeon, but he recoils at the notion of being an “officer.” He’s only in the military, he explains, because “the Pentagon caught me with a butterfly net.” His forced participation as a healer in a conflict defined by killing is at the core of the show’s absurdity.
“M*A*S*H” debuted a year before the end of the military draft. More than a generation has come of age without the specter of forced conscription. Both military and economic experts have described what used to be called “the volunteer Army” as more efficient. But it also meant armed forces without Hawkeyes, citizen soldiers whose reluctant participation tended to put the brakes on military adventurism and whose shared sacrifice was seen as essential to societal cohesion.
It didn’t take long for the popular depiction of military service to change. There was no room for Hawkeye’s smart-aleck approach in “Rambo” movies.