M*A*S*H, You Were a Smash

By RICHARD CORLISS

After eleven years of daring good humor, TV's finest half-hour signs off

Letter sent from the 4077 Mobile Army Surgical Hospital based in Ouijongbu, Korea:

Dear Mom,

Well here I am in Korea. It's a long way from Ottumwa, Iowa, but then I guess it's a long way from everybody else's home town of the guys around here too. The only thing we're not far from is the front. Three miles down the road, the war is going full blast. It's our job to patch up the wounded and, the way they say it around here is, send them back to get wounded again. Actually, I don't do the patching. I'm kind of like what you might sort of call the company clerk, which is still a pretty good thing for an 18-year-old farm boy to be if he's gotta be here. They call me Radar on account of because I can sometimes figure out what somebody's gonna say before they say it--but you knew that already. Just about all the guys here are great, my boss Colonel Blake and the surgeons and even the nurses, they're great guys too. But I miss you, Mom. Enclosed I've put some of my pay, so you can keep up your electrolysis. Love to Uncle Ed and all the animals and especially to you.

Your son, Walter

P.S. They say this war won't last long, Mom. I sure hope they're right.

Stage 9 of the 20th Century-Fox studios in Los Angeles is dark. The backdrop of khaki-drab Korean hills and everything that might serve as inventory, booty or memento have disappeared. Gone are the tables, tubing, clamps and surgical gowns from O.R.; neither the blandly frazzled Lieut. Colonel Henry Blake (McLean Stevenson) nor the avuncular Colonel Sherman Potter (Harry Morgan) will preside any more over that surgeons' battlefield. In the mess hall, the serving trays and cigarette packs are missing; Corporal Klinger (Jamie Farr), the drag queen of 4077, will never again ask Father Mulcahy (William Christopher) to give absolution to the food. The officers' club has been stripped of its jukebox and banners; only the lingering perfume of Major Margaret ("Hot Lips") Houlihan (Loretta Swit) will drive the ghost of Major Frank Burns (Larry Linville) into rages of ecstasy. And in the most famous barracks since Stalag 17--Hawkeye Pierce's Swamp--the cots, footlockers, stove, framed pictures and even the distillery are gone. The giggles and groans of Trapper John (Wayne Rogers) and B.J. Hunnicut (Mike Farrell) and Charles Emerson Winchester III (David Ogden Stiers) are now distant, poignant echoes.

The wish that Corporal Radar O'Reilly (Gary Burghoff) made has come true. In real time, the Korean conflict was over in three years; in CBS's prime time, it lasted eleven increasingly popular years; in syndicated reruns, it has proved so successful that it could outlast the Hundred Years' War. By next Monday, when its 2 1/2-hour send-off episode is aired (8:30 p.m. E.S.T.), M*A*S*H will have earned its stars as one of the funniest, most humane and formally adventurous shows ever to leave its mark on TV.

Some of its achievements can be measured in numbers. Since its debut Sept. 17, 1972, M*A*S*H has won 14 Emmys and 99 nominations. Its annual rating has climbed from 46th place to third this year (after 60 Minutes and Dallas). In the same time, the show increased the going rate for a 30-second commercial from $30,000 to about $200,000 for a regular episode and, for the feature-length finale, $450,000, topping the rate of last month's Super Bowl by $50,000, to become the most expensive half-minute in TV history. In syndication, M*A*S*H's earnings already exceed $200 million, and keep on growing. There is a price for success, and Fox should be happy to pay it: a reported $5 million or so a year to Alan Alda, who anchored the show as Captain Hawkeye Pierce and wrote and directed many of the most memorable episodes in a series whose writing was often of the highest, hippest quality.

No work of popular art can tap the money machine so deftly without touching a national pulse or nerve. M*A*S*H, a Viet Nam parable that hit the airwaves three months before the Christmas bombing of Hanoi, surely did so. Like the surgeons whose no-sweat heroism it celebrated, the series began by operating on the wounded American body politic with skill and daring good humor. For half an hour each week, hawk and dove could sit together in front of the TV set and agree: war is an existential hell to which some pretty fine people had been unfairly assigned; now they were doing their best to do good and get out. As the Viet Nam War staggered to a close and M*A*S*H generated the momentum any TV series needs to sustain its quality after the first few seasons, the show revealed itself as a gritty romance about the finest American instincts. Here were gruff pragmatism, technical ingenuity, grace under pressure, the saving perspective of wit. The men and women of 4077 MASH could be seen as us at our worst hour, finding the best part of ourselves.

A month after shooting their last scene, these men and women--the M*A*S*H actors, writers and producers--are emerging from an experience that for some of them amounted to an eleven-year blend of encounter therapy and bootcamp. "I'm totally exhausted and depressed," sighs Farr. Says Swit: "I feel as if I've never not done M*A*S*H." Ask them what the show was, what made it unique, and you get a jumble of answers and impressions. From Alda: "The audience made a pact with us. We could be as imaginative and exploratory as we wanted--black-and-white newsreel style for 'The Interview,' surrealist in 'Dreams,' shooting in actual time or covering a whole year in one episode--because they knew we would never be wanton with them." From Morgan, a veteran of eight TV series: "M*A*S*H was about helping people." From Stiers: "There was always laughter on the set. Maybe that reflected our sense of freedom and accomplishment." From Christopher, whose Father Mulcahy was the perpetual supporting player: "What was M*A*S*H about? It was about a chaplain in Korea."

Well, no. M*A*S*H was about doctors in Korea, and it drew from real life and death as faithfully as many documentaries. Larry Gelbart and Gene Reynolds, who developed the show for TV, talked with dozens of surgeons and nurses who had served in Korea; they even visited a Korean MASH base for more memories. Later, Burt Metcalfe, who took over as producer after Gelbart and Reynolds left, continued the tradition. "We've spoken to almost every doctor who was in Korea," Metcalfe claims. "At least 60% of the plots dealing with medical or military incidents were taken from real life." Says Reynolds: "These guys gave us details we never would have thought of. They kept us honest." Gelbart recalls one doctor's remark: "He said, 'In the winter it is so cold in the O.R. that when the surgeon cuts into a patient, steam rises from the body, and the surgeon will warm his hands over the open wound.' In the last show I wrote and directed, 'The Interview,' I had Father Mulcahy use those exact words when he was asked if the war had changed him."

Dear Dad,

A year in Korea and no end in sight. Last week we suffered a visitation by some brigadier general who tried to boost morale by telling us that we are bringing democracy to this green and peasant land. That was the most ridiculous thing I ever heard. I felt like telling His Belligerence that what this country needs is a good five-cent czar. My tentmate, Major Frank Burns, is even more amusing, if you get your laughs from psychotic paranoia complicated by a spine-wide streak of yellow. He thinks we're here to save Korea from the Koreans, and that when the war is over Seoul will be colonized by the Fort Wayne Kiwanis Club. I couldn't help breaking into a chorus of the Ethel Merman song: "There's no vinism like chauvinism like no vinism I know."

I guess Frank is just the carrier. The disease, the bubonic plague, is knowing that our O.R. is just a three-day pass that wounded kids are given before being shipped back to the front. We knit and purl and offer kind words and jokes so bad even Milton Berle wouldn't steal them. For me, joking is therapeutic. It's the only way I have of opening my mouth without screaming.

Here I am babbling, Dad, and I know you brook no babble. But what can you expect of a barefoot surgeon from Crabapple Cove, Me. ? I can't wait to come home, hug you and then log six or seven months' sleep.

Love, Hawkeye

Before it became a television series, M*A*S*H had been a mildly successful novel (1968) by Richard Hooker and a surprise hit movie (1970) directed by Robert Altman and written by Ring Lardner Jr. Most of the TV show's major characters were sketched in by the movie, but the tone was '50s frat house, and the emphasis was on the safety-valve sexual high jinks that the heroes perpetrated on some of their uptight colleagues. These droll humiliations would have been too raunchy for TV and too alienating for audiences in search of a weekly identification figure. Enter Alan Alda, who was starring in films and TV movies without having hit it big and who was now ready for the right series. "In talking with Larry Gelbart and Gene Reynolds," Alda recalls, "I wanted to be sure that we weren't making an Abbott & Costello Go to Korea, using the war just as a straight line for the jokes. The war had to be a springboard for our best efforts, exploring the horror, not ignoring it." Everyone agreed that this would be, in Reynolds' words, "a different Hawkeye, more sensitive, compassionate and serious than in the film but, through Alan's lovely comic touch, an engaging man withal."

He proved to be something more than that. Like the hero of Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, this Hawkeye is an exemplar of the American democrat, the self-reliant nobleman of nature who trailblazes into a wilderness of the spirit and emerges stronger and wiser. Alda's modern pathfinder is also very much a man of the mid-20th century: liberally educated and not reluctant to parade it, perversely triumphant in a milieu he blithely declares himself unfit to inhabit, japing and shambling after women, with a quip and an invisible cigar, like a Wasp Groucho. In later episodes, Hawkeye occasionally looked as if he were campaigning for canonization. But he could still bend, and come near breaking, whether in realizing he had a serious drinking problem or in surrendering to the inexplicable but powerful erotic appeal of his long time nemesis, Hot Lips Houlihan.

Every sitcom must have its bad guys, even as every war finds its black-market profiteers, body-count fanatics and suspicious spooks. M*A*S*H had its fair and flaky share, led by Frank Burns, the camp martinet. As Linville notes, Burns had "a mind that's obviously stripped its gears, and yet here he is standing over other human beings with a knife in his hand." At first, locked in a dead end affair with Frank, Hot Lips was simply a stock shrew, an excellent nurse but a failure as a woman. She was also attracted despite herself to the antic Hawkeye and Trapper John, and Swit and the writers saw possibilities in that. "First she be came unhappy with Frank," Swit recalls. "She realized there had to be something more in life for her. Then she started to talk about how lonely her position of authority made her feel. She was married and divorced, and she softened and hardened and grew from that experience. In the episode 'Comrades in Arms,' where she and Hawkeye are stranded and make love, both characters changed: they could never be true archrivals again."

In a superior TV comedy series, familiarity breeds regeneration. The actors become wedded to their characters and, like fond spouses, exchange idiosyncrasies. The writers learn more about the actors and incorporate the nuances into the story lines. M*A*S*H had another advantage, although at the time it must have seemed a daunting challenge. Four of the first season's eight regular cast members eventually left the show, and with each replacement the circle of community became tighter. In his rubber-limbed way, Stevenson's Colonel Blake had been as much a MASH misfit as Frank Burns: a suburban doctor reluctant to command, with a fisherman's wily patience and a heart of puppy chow. When Stevenson departed after the third season (his character was reported killed in an airplane crash in the Sea of Japan), Harry Morgan as Colonel Sherman Potter took over. A cavalryman in the first World War who turned medic and was Regular Army to his jodhpurs, Potter became the stern but sentimental father figure every MASHman needed 7,000 miles from home. Similarly, B.J. Hunnicut was an idealistic Marin County version of Trapper John, and Winchester, however smug he might appear to be about his old-money Bostonian lineage, was a Persian pussycat compared with Frank Burns. Each of these characters and actors fed the M*A*S*H organism without disrupting it. Each helped keep the show alive and healthy without breaking the circle.

After 251 episodes, 104 hours of enriching entertainment, M*A*S*H is preparing to complete the circle in a blaze of hype and hush-hush. In this week's episode (the last to be filmed), the 4077 troop buries a time capsule in anticipation of the war's end. For next week's 2 1/2-hour finale, the company is maintaining a who-shot-J.R.-style secrecy in hope of snagging the highest single-show rating ever. "It's a very simple story," says Alda, who directed and helped write the final show. "The war comes to an end, and the stories of the lives of these people in this place are resolved." There are hints that Klinger will get married and Hawkeye will come close to a nervous breakdown. Beyond that, speculation turns to fancy. Will Radar or Frank or Trapper or even a resurrected Henry Blake return, in person or in flashback? Will everyone survive the armistice? Or will, as one waggish M*A*S*H watcher suggests, the 4077 be told that they have been literally in Korea for these eleven years, that it is now 1963 and time to re-up for Viet Nam?

Two things are certain. The first is that Potter, Klinger and Father Mulcahy will be reunited next season on CBS in After MASH, a series set in a Veterans hospital in the U.S., to be written by Gelbart and produced by Metcalfe. The second is that in the post-op of reruns, the members of the 4077 will continue indefinitely to act bonkers, save lives and refresh viewers' spirits. Radar will lose and find his Teddy bear and, maybe, lose his virginity. Klinger will show up in that cunning little chiffon number he bought in Seoul. Frank will fritter and whine and cluck like a chicken. B.J. will keep trying to prove he is not the most decent soul south of the 38th parallel. Winchester will open another picnic basket from Mater and savor caviar on a tongue depressor. Father Mulcahy will smile and sigh. Trapper will somehow keep his balance on that second-banana peel. Hot Lips will practice her yoga and do her nails. Henry will accidentally impale himself on a hypodermic needle. Hawkeye will wonder at the insanity of it all, and wonder too whether he is part of the problem or the solution. And Sherman Potter, who has seen it all before in other wars, will grimace like the Sphinx and let the vinegar flow all the way home.

Dear Mildred, I'm sure you've heard, my dear. The war is over. Horse hockey-pucks! it took longer than I'd've thought. I sometimes wonder whether we're getting better at this sort of thing. The men of the 4077 would surely say we ought to get worse and then give it up. One of them called me -- sit down and listen to this -- "a tough, bandy-legged little mustang. " Donkey doughnuts! That Winchester can get under my old hide. I guess all of them have, and I guess they'll stay there. When I came to this MASH they looked like a strange new breed of soldier.

Of course, they're really civilian doctors, and damn good ones too. I'm gonna miss them. Hey, Mother, what say we bring the whole lot of them over to the home for one last schnapps? It'd sure beat watching that thing you've been spending all your time with -- what's it, television?

Love forever, Sherman -- By Richard Corliss. Reported by Denise Worrell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Denise Worrell/Los Angeles This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.