You are here: Home > Archives for m*a*s*h

‘April Fools’

11 April 2016 by 2 Comments

M*A*S*H: A writer’s view. #14 in the series.

M*A*S*H, as I have mentioned before, reached a grand climacteric in 1979. Before that, while the series gradually changed in tone, becoming more dramatic and less consistently funny, it remained substantially the same show that Larry Gelbart and Gene Reynolds had created. Actors left the cast, but new characters were invented to replace them; writers left the show’s stable, but new talent was recruited. The newer writers were not in the same league as Gelbart, Laurence Marks, or Greenbaum and Fritzell; but they were quite good enough to ensure the smooth running of the machine that those more gifted hands had built.

After 1979, the show stopped developing altogether. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Essays Tagged With: ,

Coming attractions

2 April 2016 by 6 Comments

I am happy to report that my health is taking a mild turn for the better, and I am once again able to work with some semblance of regularity.

Tonight I returned to my series of essais on M*A*S*H, and finished the draft of a post analysing the eighth-season episode, ‘April Fools’. (It seemed like a good time of year for it.) I shall put it up as soon as I go back and insert all the fiddly formatting code for the screenplay bits.

In other news, I have almost completed the final edit on Style is the Rocket. What remains now, chiefly, is the tedious job of collating my sources and writing up the bibliography and endnotes. I shall spread this work over the next week or two, because it is time-consuming and desperately dull. But deo volente, I shall have a new book out in April.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: ,

‘Operation Friendship’

21 September 2015 by 8 Comments

M*A*S*H: A writer’s view. #13 in the series.

The last of the comedy doubles on M*A*S*H is a study in opposites. One was a streetwise working-class kid from Toledo; the other was a Boston Brahmin who, the minute he was born, spat out the silver spoon because it was not 14-karat gold. One was the first regular character not taken from Hooker’s novel; the other was the last character added to the cast, and was loosely based on a pair of surgeons who appeared in the book.

Five years into the series’ run, Jim Fritzell and Everett Greenbaum went back to the fountainhead for a scene that would help them with one of their most difficult writing tasks. Near the end of the book, two replacement surgeons arrive at the 4077th: a pair of young Ivy Leaguers fresh out of residency, Captains Emerson Pinkham and Leverett Russell. Col. Blake makes the Swampmen show them the peculiar techniques of meatball surgery, instead of letting them sweat it out and learn for themselves. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Essays Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

‘Goodbye, Radar’, Part 2

13 September 2015 by 6 Comments

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…]

Filed Under: Essays Tagged With: , , ,

‘Goodbye, Radar’, Part 1

12 September 2015 by 9 Comments

M*A*S*H: A writer’s view. #11 in the series.

Now we come to the character that was the unquestioned heart of M*A*S*H: Corporal Walter Eugene ‘Radar’ O’Reilly, late of Ottumwa, Iowa, myopic farmboy, animal lover, Grape Nehi drinker, perpetual adolescent, and all-round débrouillard. When Gary Burghoff gave up the role after seven years, a considerable part of the show’s appeal left with him; also some of the audience, though not enough to seriously damage the ratings. When other actors left, their characters were replaced: Henry Blake with Col. Potter, Trapper John with B. J., Frank Burns with Winchester. Radar was irreplaceable.

The first thing we find out about Radar in ‘M*A*S*H: The Pilot’, in the very first scene before the opening credits, is that he hears incoming helicopters before anyone else. This ability, along with his nickname and his home town, came from the real-life Radar: Don Shafer, who served in Korea as company clerk to the 171st Evacuation Hospital. (Unlike Radar O’Reilly, Shafer went on to serve in Vietnam and eventually earned the rank of chief warrant officer.) In a 2009 interview, Shafer distinguished himself from his fictional counterpart: ‘I didn’t have ESP, obviously – I’m not sure if anyone does – but I was observant. I would listen for things… that nobody else was listening for.’

The novel MASH makes it clear that Radar does have ESP; the Robert Altman movie makes him do things that pretty solidly imply it; the TV series leaves it an open question. The TV Radar’s anticipations of events can generally be explained by natural causes, first among which is the sheer predictability of his superiors. Radar knows the official routine of the 4077th so well that he can put his hands on any needed paperwork five minutes before Col. Blake even knows it will be needed, and he is generally even ahead of Col. Potter. This is solidly established in the pilot episode, in the first scene where we see Radar in Col. Blake’s office. Radar has just come into the room behind Henry’s back, anticipating the call: [Read more…]

Filed Under: Essays Tagged With: , , , , , ,

‘Hot Lips is Back in Town’

3 September 2015 by 7 Comments

M*A*S*H: A writer’s view. #10 in the series.

Let us go back a bit, to the spring of 1977. The finale of the fifth season of M*A*S*H was ‘Margaret’s Wedding’, which was also the swan song for Gene Reynolds (who directed the episode) and Larry Linville. It also marked the first on-screen appearance of Col. Donald Penobscot, whose off-screen engagement to Margaret Houlihan had already caused such far-reaching changes to the tone of the show and the balance of the cast.


On this occasion only, Penobscot was played by Beeson Carroll: clean-cut, likable, well-spoken apart from a tendency to mix up words when drunk (he finished ‘396th out of 227’ at West Point, where he went in for ‘Greco-wrestle Romaning’). It was a hilarious rather than a happy ending to the engagement. The Swampmen, in one of their most heartless practical jokes, encase the hapless Penobscot in a body cast the night before the wedding. By the time they relent and try to tell Margaret that he has not broken half the bones in his body, it is too late: the newlyweds are already departing by helicopter, and can’t hear over the noise of the chopper blades. The only blue note in the composition is played by Frank Burns, standing alone and forlorn on the helicopter pad, saying to the empty sky: ‘Goodbye, Margaret.’


And goodbye it is: for while Loretta Swit returned in the new season and remained with M*A*S*H to the end, Hot Lips was gone for good. (It is significant that her nickname is used only a handful of times in the last six seasons.) Nor was it simply a case of replacing ‘Miss Houlihan’ with ‘Mrs. Penobscot’. The new production team, dominated by Alan Alda, decreed that Margaret’s marriage should be doomed from the start.


In ‘Fade Out, Fade In’, besides writing out Frank Burns and writing in Charles Emerson Winchester III, Fritzell and Greenbaum were assigned the task of wrecking the marriage during the honeymoon. Margaret actually leaves Donald in Tokyo and returns to the 4077th before her leave is over. The Swampmen, consumed with curiosity, pester her with kindness until she confesses:

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Essays Tagged With: , , ,

‘Fallen Idol’

22 August 2015 by 12 Comments

M*A*S*H: A writer’s view. #9 in the series.

Before we can continue with the story of Margaret Houlihan, we need to take note of an irrevocable change that happened on M*A*S*H at this time. In 1977, after five years on the show, Gene Reynolds stepped down as executive producer. He continued to be listed on the credits as ‘Creative Consultant’, but what this meant, in effect, was that the new production team had a chat with him once a week or thereabouts. It was no longer his show. Larry Gelbart, as we have seen, left a year earlier and was not even involved as an occasional consultant. At the same time, Allan Katz and Don Reo stepped down as producers after a single year at the helm.

So whose show was M*A*S*H now? Burt Metcalfe, who had been with the show from the beginning, and had shared production credit with Katz and Reo in the fifth season, was now credited as sole producer. But this is misleading. Metcalfe was a superb technician, who could always be relied upon to keep a show running smoothly, to work around any production glitches and keep the Hollywood-sized egos around him suitably groomed and massaged. He was a perfect right-hand man. That was the job he had done for Gene Reynolds for five years, and he would continue to do it for six more. But for whom? In theory, Reynolds was still his superior. But his actual boss was the other man listed in the new position of Creative Consultant: Alan Alda.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Essays Tagged With: ,

‘The Abduction of Margaret Houlihan’

16 August 2015 by 5 Comments

M*A*S*H: A writer’s view. #8 in the series.

As you might expect from an eleven-year TV series about a three-year war, the continuity on M*A*S*H was frequently dire. Television in those days was often lax about continuity – the ‘series bible’ was an innovation that had really only come in with Star Trek a few years before, and had not yet fully caught on – but M*A*S*H was an egregious offender.

When the series began, Hawkeye was from Vermont, where he had a mother and a sister living; later he was an only child from Maine, and his mother was dead. Colonel Blake’s wife was originally named Mildred; then she became Lorraine, and Mildred was reused for the name of Colonel Potter’s wife. Potter had a son, and a major plot in one episode concerned the baby pool betting on the sex, weight, and birthdate of his first grandchild. A few years later, that extended family had vanished down the memory hole, and Potter’s only child was a daughter, who had children born before the war.

Chronology got equally short shrift. About five Christmases were crammed into the three-year duration of the Korean War. The date of Potter’s arrival at the 4077th is given as 19 September 1952, but in a late episode (‘A War For All Seasons’) Potter is playing Father Time on New Year’s Eve of 1950 (and again in 1951). A fourth-season episode refers to Vice-President Nixon, who took office in 1953 as Eisenhower’s running mate, but a tenth-season episode has Hawkeye writing a letter to President Truman, Eisenhower’s predecessor. Writers for M*A*S*H soon learnt to avoid tying episodes down to specific dates; but the continual turnover of the staff meant that there was always a new bug ready to make the same mistake.

Major Margaret ‘Hot Lips’ Houlihan, played by Loretta Swit, was only one of two series regulars to last the show’s entire run. It would be unreasonable to expect that the writers would make an exception in her favour to their cavalier attitude; and in fact Margaret is not spared from the general incoherence. Her father, explicitly declared to be dead in an early episode, actually makes a personal appearance in the late episode ‘Father’s Day’. Indeed, Margaret’s development as a character is only made possible by the show’s Silly Putty calendar. Consider: [Read more…]

Filed Under: Essays Tagged With: , , , ,

M*A*S*H: A landing page!

5 August 2015 by 3 Comments

A while back, my good friend, esteemed colleague, and boss at Abyss & Apex, Wendy S. Delmater, began badgering me to put up a landing page where my essays on M*A*S*H would be collected for easy reference. I shirked this task as long as I decently could; but this evening (not finding myself up to more productive work) I slogged through the Byzantine maze of WordPress menus and editing windows, and came up with a simple page as a starting point for the series.

Ecce paginam!

The keen of eye will notice that the cryptic legend ‘M*A*S*H’ has been added to the navigation menu above the masthead. Clicking on that will take you there, too.

Filed Under: News Tagged With:

‘Ferret Face’

5 August 2015 by 13 Comments

M*A*S*H: A writer’s view. #7 in the series.

When McLean Stevenson and Wayne Rogers left M*A*S*H, as I have discussed, they broke up two of the three double acts that made up the original cast. At the same time, quite unintentionally, they sealed the fate of the third. Frank Burns and ‘Hot Lips’ Houlihan were still partners in crime after the departure of Henry and Trapper, but their crimes were never the same again. The arrival of Col. Potter started a process that led to Frank’s complete disintegration as a character, so that there was no option but to release Larry Linville from the show when his contract was up. This did not arise from any shortcoming of Linville’s as a performer. The decline and fall of Frank Burns was purely a matter of errors in writing; and for this reason I want to examine it in some detail.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Essays Tagged With: , , , , , ,
Next Page »