M*A*S*H: A writer’s view. #12 in the series.

After three seasons on M*A*S*H, Gary Burghoff, like many Hollywood stars, was having serious trouble with his marriage. Unlike many of them, he did not give in to the easy solution of a divorce. So he renegotiated his deal with Fox; henceforward he would appear in only 14 of the 24 episodes each season, allowing him more time with his family. To keep up appearances, he was listed in the opening credits of every episode, and it is quite possible for the casual viewer not to notice his absence unless the script calls attention to it. Usually that attention-calling takes the form of having Klinger serve as company clerk pro tem.

After four more years, this half-measure was no longer enough. Burghoff’s domestic problems were becoming acute, and besides, it was becoming harder every year for an actor in his thirties to play a character perpetually in his late teens. He was becoming typecast as the adolescent boy he could no longer portray. Moreover, there is evidence that he was not popular with his castmates. At that time, Burghoff had the usual insecurities of the actor to an unusual degree. He could be touchy, thin-skinned, and temperamental; and the fact that he practised his own version of ‘Method’ acting did not make him easier to work with – though it probably contributed to the emotional sincerity of his performance, and allowed him to pass himself off as the teenaged Radar years longer than he might have done by conventional techniques. The fact that he received special treatment from Fox, being spared the gruelling schedule of a 24-episode season, probably did not endear him to his fellow actors. Everybody loved Radar, but nobody, it seems, cared much for Gary Burghoff; and in the end the contradiction was too much to sustain.

Ken Levine and David Isaacs, the story editors, also wanted out. Levine tells how he came to his decision to leave the show. They were just shooting an episode called ‘Preventive Medicine’, another script by Tom Reeder, in which Hawkeye removes a perfectly healthy appendix from a bloodthirsty line officer to get him removed from command. One day, Levine went home and saw a M*A*S*H rerun on the TV. It was an episode from about five years before, with exactly the same plot device; only that time it was written by Larry Gelbart, and consequently funnier and more dramatic. The only way in which the new episode improved on the old one was that B. J. gave a passionate argument against Hawkeye’s scheme: ‘Cutting into a healthy body is mutilation!’ Even that was put in at the insistence of Mike Farrell, who had a heated dispute with Alan Alda over that precise point. It was then that Levine realized the show was repeating itself, and he was running out of original contributions to make. It was time to go.

Before they left, Levine and Isaacs wrote one final script: the two-part ‘Goodbye, Radar’. [Read more…]