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‘Hey, Doc’

27 July 2015 by 13 Comments

M*A*S*H: A writer’s view. #6 in the series.

We have arrived at the fourth season of M*A*S*H. The show has weathered the first storm of cast changes with its audience more or less intact, though the tone is subtly changing. The war is still a horrible and inhuman calamity, beyond the power of any of the characters to prevent or affect; but we can no longer say the same of the Army.

Hitherto, the spirit of the armed forces has been represented by the duo of Frank Burns and ‘Hot Lips’ Houlihan, not so much characters as caricatures, and their futile quest to turn a parcel of draftee doctors into GIs. They were the Enemy, with a capital E; the North Koreans and Chinese were merely a disaster, usually offscreen. But now Colonel Potter, the career man, is in charge, and third on the bill: he is one of Us, and that means that the Regular Army, in toto and categorically, can no longer quite be regarded as Them.

There will be plenty more stories about military stupidity, wrongheaded regulations, gung-ho but incompetent officers; but the emphasis changes. These things that continue to afflict the 4077th are diseases of the military; we begin to lose the sense that the military, as such, is the disease. In this, the show is changing with the times. The Vietnam War reached its final catastrophe in 1975: North Vietnamese troops entered Saigon on April 30, just six weeks after ‘Abyssinia, Henry’ was broadcast. M*A*S*H, the film, was a thinly veiled protest against that war; the TV series continued in the same vein. But there was no longer a war to protest against; if the show had gone on that way, it would have become a museum piece.

As it was, M*A*S*H lost a considerable chunk of its audience. Many fans of the show stopped watching in outrage after Henry Blake was killed; the show dropped out of the top ten in the Nielsen ratings the following season, though not out of the top twenty. But the new characters, Potter and Hunnicutt, quickly won over the remaining viewers, and the fourth season produced a new flowering of technical excellence.

This was the last year with Larry Gelbart and Gene Reynolds in charge (now credited as co-producers). They continued to refresh the pool of writing talent, in part, by tapping their long-time connections in the industry. One of the new writers was Rick Mittleman, who received his first and, alas, only M*A*S*H credit for an episode called ‘Hey, Doc’. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Essays Tagged With: ,

‘Abyssinia’

24 July 2015 by 27 Comments

M*A*S*H: A writer’s view. #5 in the series.

In one of my previous posts on M*A*S*H, I mentioned that the original cast, with its three distinct comedy double acts, could have carried on almost indefinitely, but that external forces prevented them. The old theologians liked to talk about the three great sources of temptation, the World, the Flesh, and the Devil; and one could make a pretty fair case that these three tempters broke up the three double acts and prepared the way for the series’ eventual decline. Actually, the frequent changes of cast were a mixed blessing for M*A*S*H. The exquisite structure of the original cast was broken up. On the other hand, new actors and new characters meant new situations that the writers could exploit; and since the writers themselves were replaced at a fairly steady rate (until the great climacteric of ’79, to be discussed later), there were always fresh approaches and new points of view in the scripts.

The third season, for instance, featured the first scripts by Linda Bloodworth and Mary Kay Place, the show’s first women writers; their chief contribution, perhaps, was to make the nurses more important to the stories, without using them merely as love interests or sexual foils for the surgeons. Mary Kay Place guest-starred in an episode she had co-written, ‘Springtime’, playing a nurse whom Radar inadvertently (and comically) seduces by reading her a horrible poem by ‘Ruptured Brooke’:

The damned ship lurched and slithered. Quiet and quick
My cold gorge rose; the long sea rolled; I knew
I must think hard of something, or be sick….

Do I forget you? Retchings twist and tie me,
Old meat, good meals, brown gobbets, up I throw—

At which point Place throws herself at Radar, moaning, ‘You don’t give a girl a chance!’ Whereupon the rest of the poem (‘A Channel Passage’) is fortunately lost.

But the real genius of the middle years of M*A*S*H belonged to a veteran writing team that Larry Gelbart brought in for the third season: Jim Fritzell and Everett Greenbaum, who had cut their teeth in radio, and had worked in television since the beginning of that medium. Before he died, Greenbaum did a long interview for the Archive of American Television, which (among many other reminiscences) sheds much light on the process of writing for M*A*S*H.

Greenbaum and Fritzell, more than anyone except the show’s creators, had their fingers on the pulse of M*A*S*H; they understood the characters (and the armed forces) intimately. So the producers relied on them exclusively for the most difficult and delicate writing jobs of all: writing out old characters and introducing new ones whenever the cast was changed. [Read more…]

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‘Deal Me Out’

13 July 2015 by 4 Comments

M*A*S*H: A writer’s view. #4 in the series.

Until the middle of the 1970s, conventional wisdom had it that a half-hour situation comedy had room for only one plot per episode. Subplots, if any, were kept down to the level of a running gag. Fitting a good story (and some laughs) into 25 minutes of film was hard enough; to tell two was thought to be impossible. M*A*S*H was one of the first sitcoms to break that rule and introduce multiple story lines per episode: so successfully, in fact, that the technique became a mainstay of the show’s formula in later years. Nearly every episode from the fourth season on has clearly identifiable ‘A’ and ‘B’ stories.

In those later years, when the original writers had been replaced by lesser talents, the ‘A’ story was usually straight drama. This afforded the actors opportunities for Serious Dramatics and tub-thumping on their favourite causes célèbres, whilst making the writers’ jobs easier. Comedy is much more difficult to write than drama; it is harder to act, too – though far less gratifying for the performer’s ego, since Oscars and Emmys and the like are generally awarded by humourless clods. (Charlie Chaplin never won an Academy Award as an actor; he got his sole Oscar as a composer, for the score to Limelight. Before he died, the Academy gave him an honorary award for lifetime achievement as an actor: the feeling was that if they let Chaplin die without winning an Oscar for his acting, the Oscars themselves would be devalued. Chaplin did not win an Oscar so much as the Academy won a Chaplin.)

In the first year and a half of M*A*S*H, there were several ‘odds and ends’ episodes, consisting mostly of comic sketches strung together without much pretence of a plot. Usually, the unifying device was a character’s letter home, as in the ‘Dear Dad’ episodes. ‘Showtime’, the final episode of the first season, lacked even that. Commissioned at the last moment, when CBS demanded one more episode than Reynolds and Gelbart thought they were under contract for, it features a USO performance at the camp, intercut with brief comical interludes. This was not where the future of the series lay.

That future began with an episode called ‘Deal Me Out’, in which, for the first time, the writers worked multiple plot lines together into a unified story. The structure is complex and ambitious, and in lesser hands, could easily have turned into an unfocused mess. Fortunately, the writers were Larry Gelbart and Laurence Marks, and the script is a landmark, not only in the history of M*A*S*H, but in sitcom history as a whole. [Read more…]

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‘Chief Surgeon Who?’

26 May 2015 by 2 Comments

M*A*S*H: A writer’s view. #3 in the series.

In the 1970s, American TV networks still jealously guarded their right (honoured by time but by nobody else) to broadcast episodes of shows in whatever order they pleased. Sometimes show-runners used this tradition in their own favour, working with the network to reserve a show already in the can and run it at a more dramatically appropriate time in the season. ‘Henry, Please Come Home’, though the second episode of M*A*S*H to be filmed, was the ninth one broadcast. This gave the characters time to establish themselves with the viewing public, and increased the surprise when Frank Burns was abruptly put in command of the 4077th.

Next, the M*A*S*H crew turned out several run-of-the-mill sitcom episodes. Hawkeye taps Frank for a pint of blood in his sleep; Hawkeye and Trapper trade Henry’s antique desk on the black market for medical supplies; Hawkeye does a hammy turn as a private eye. These stories could just as well have taken place in any of the old-fashioned military comedies that M*A*S*H was supposed to be in such strong reaction against – Sgt. Bilko or Gomer Pyle. Only the recurring O.R. scenes reminded us that the war was going on and people were dying. It is said that Alan Alda’s contract required at least one O.R. scene in every episode. He had been reluctant to sign on (though CBS had made him their first and only choice for the role of Hawkeye), because he feared that the show would inevitably devolve into yet another routine sitcom about hijinks in the service. It nearly happened. A march to the rear was called for: M*A*S*H needed to reconnect with its roots.

Larry Gelbart achieved this in fine style with another script adapted from an incident in the novel (and the film): ‘Chief Surgeon Who?’ The intervening episodes had allowed the actors to settle into their roles; now, for the first time, we see the structure of the cast – the three double acts – in full bloom. This episode marks several important milestones for the series all at once. Hawkeye definitely takes over as the lead character, giving the lie to the original idea that this was to be a show with an ensemble cast. The writers say their final farewell to MASH, the novel: this is the last script drawn from Richard Hooker’s book, except for a single scene five years later. It also marks the first appearance of a breakout character, later to become the first series regular not taken from the book or movie: the unforgettable Maxwell Q. Klinger.

For all these reasons, ‘Chief Surgeon Who?’ is worth studying in detail. [Read more…]

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‘Henry, Please Come Home’

23 May 2015 by 2 Comments

M*A*S*H: A writer’s view. #2 in the series.

‘M*A*S*H: The Pilot’ had a successful screening, and the show was duly picked up by CBS for the 1972–73 season. When the cast and crew reconvened to begin filming the first season proper, they began with an establishing script, ‘Henry, Please Come Home’, written by Laurence Marks. Marks was an old hand at comedy writing: he and Larry Gelbart had worked together on scripts for Jack Paar and Bob Hope in the 1940s. Among many other credits, Marks went on to write no less than 68 episodes of Hogan’s Heroes. He would eventually receive a writing credit on 28 M*A*S*H scripts, second only to Gelbart himself.

‘Henry, Please Come Home’ laid important groundwork for the series. It was the first of several episodes to put Frank Burns in temporary command of the 4077th, fuelling and justifying the long feud between him and the other Swampmen. At ordinary times, Pierce and McIntyre took no notice of Burns’s superior rank, and noticed Burns himself only to insult him, abuse him, heckle him, and (on one memorable occasion) crate him to be shipped out of the country. As cartoonish as Burns was, this was a heavy weight of misbehaviour for the official Good Guys of the series to bear. Gelbart and his writing staff made amply certain that Burns’s actions as temporary C.O. fully justified the Swampmen’s retaliation. He gave as bad as he got. On this particular occasion, one of his first actions is to have an M.P. confiscate Hawkeye and Trapper’s distillery at gunpoint. This drives the other surgeons (still including ‘Spearchucker’ Jones at this point) to the brink of insurrection.

I reconstruct the relevant bits of the script, going by the finished episode. (My apologies for the formatting: HTML was not designed to display screenplays.) This is not only good television writing, and good comedy writing; it is good writing, period, and displays a number of techniques useful even to those of us who write solely for print. I shall go into those a bit later. Meanwhile, the script, from the point at which the surgeons rebel:

          HAWKEYE
Gentlemen, that man has got to go. It’s either him or us. That’s final.

          TRAPPER
How we gonna do it? Shoot him?

          SPEARCHUCKER
Stab him!

          TRAPPER
Poison him!

          HAWKEYE
No, no! We gotta think this over. We have to give it careful, considered, intelligent thought.

          TRAPPER
Okay.

          HAWKEYE
Then we’ll shoot him, stab him, or poison him!

[Read more…]

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‘Par is a live patient’: a P.S.

22 May 2015 by 2 Comments

My own serial in (occasional) progress, which I depreciatingly call ‘the Orchard of Dis-Pear’ and hope to resume work on some time soon, was actually inspired partly by my revisiting of M*A*S*H. It was the idea of the three double acts that sired Where Angels Die upon my imagination; though my serial will have, I imagine, nothing like the felicity and depth of humour that M*A*S*H had. We cannot all be Larry Gelbart, but we can at least be ourselves.

In Where Angels Die, the three double acts are (1) the two paladin/exorcists, Revel and the Badger; (2) Baron Vail and his steward Greyhand; (3) the chief Paladin and Angel at Angel Keep, Master Herison and Lady Swan, whom you have not yet met. They bear some resemblance to the duos of Hawkeye–Trapper, Col. Blake–Radar, and Frank–Hot Lips, but of course their stories, and the kind of stories to be written about them, are quite different.

In other news, when I simply cannot brain at all, I have occasionally been reduced to watching an episode of Gilligan’s Island: after which the grey matter rebels, and insists upon either functioning or going to sleep – either of which is an improvement. Gilligan is every bit as stupid as I recall from my childhood; it is deliberately stupid, but endearingly stupid, an art form that has since been lost and may well remain so. I could say that Gilligan’s Island is the dumb blonde of American sitcoms. However, it has redeeming points – chiefly in the fine comic performances of the actors, above all Bob Denver and Jim Backus – and two areas of genuine excellence. For one, it was a fertile vehicle for parody; in its three-year run, the show did sendups of every genre of film and popular fiction under the sun, from Westerns and monster movies to Hamlet and The Count of Monte Cristo. For another, the incidental music was far superior to the show itself; it was only on this latest revisit that I fully appreciated just how good the score was (excluding the idiotic theme song, which was composed by another hand). From the credits, I discovered that the score was written by an up-and-coming young composer named Johnny Williams.

Yes, that John Williams. This may be old news to everybody else, but my mind was sufficiently boggled; and somehow I find myself fonder of Williams than I was before.

Filed Under: Miscellany Tagged With: , , , ,

‘Par is a live patient’

22 May 2015 by 13 Comments

M*A*S*H: A writer’s view. First in a series.

The Korean War is still not a hundred years in the past, though it is long enough now that the surviving veterans of that war are becoming rather thin on the ground. But even in 1972, when M*A*S*H went on the air, the series format for storytelling was much older than a hundred years. Before television, there was radio; before radio, there were the newspapers and magazines, and the ‘penny dreadfuls’ that kept every literate child supplied with lurid adventure. If you go back far enough, you can trace the roots of the form all the way to the Odyssey; which, come to think of it, would make a fine TV series in its own right.

 

KOREA, 1950: A hundred years ago

Opening titles, ‘M*A*S*H: The Pilot’

 

The smash TV series, so to speak, of 1836 was The Pickwick Papers: Mr. Pickwick and his comic manservant, Sam Weller, were the talk of England for a year and a half, and soon after in every country where their serialized adventures were reprinted or translated. Their creator, Charles Dickens, went on to become the acknowledged giant of Victorian letters, and single-handedly created a kind of literary celebrity that has had none but pale imitations since; though some of Dickens’ inventions, like the author’s reading, plague us still.

Nowadays, after its century-long detour through the mass media, the serial story is having something of a revival in print. With the rise of ebooks, the length of publishable stories is no longer limited by the demands of commercial printing. It takes a certain length of story to fill enough pages to justify the cost of printing book covers, and above another certain length, the book becomes too thick for the binding to hold together without inordinate expense. The serial, in its revived form, can transgress both those limits. Individual episodes can be as short as short stories, yet be profitable to sell individually. A whole series can be as long as the ‘binge reader’ likes and the author can supply. There was no end to the old tales and ballads about Robin Hood; The Count of Monte Cristo, by Dickens’ great French counterpart, runs a tidy half-million words or so. Pickwick itself makes a long book, but it is a book of short episodes; not a picaresque, as it is sometimes called by blinkered literary critics, but an episodic series – in fact, a situation comedy.

There is no reason why situation comedy (or any other kind of story) should be restricted to one medium. Some of the best work in that field was done by P. G. Wodehouse, whose most famous creations, Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, appeared in print, in short story and novel form, over a span of nearly sixty years. Some stories, it is true, are suited for one particular medium. Visual spectacle, whether in the grand form of colossal special effects or the modest form of slapstick, requires a visual medium – film or television. Close introspection, the detailed examination of a character’s thoughts and emotions, lends itself better to written work: which has led some misguided souls to suppose that only the solemn psychological novel is worthy of being regarded as literature. But there is a wide range of stories that can be told in written or dramatic form, according to taste and budget. The story of character need not be the soul-searching or navel-gazing of a single protagonist; it can as easily arise from the interactions between several more or less fleshed-out characters. And that kind of story can often be told equally well in whatever medium one prefers.

M*A*S*H is just that kind of story; or rather, that kind of story cycle. [Read more…]

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Now for something different

18 May 2015 by 5 Comments

I recently reconnected with my old friend Bruce Sheane, who was his mother’s primary caregiver when she was dying of cancer about 15 years ago. I wasn’t in his position, thank God, but the endless trainwreck with lawyers and courts and powers of attorney was draining in a different way. I had a good talk with Bruce about the situation, and about my recent spell of slug-brain syndrome. I said that my brain had been in crisis mode so long, now that the crisis was over it had no idea what to do with itself and I was just sitting there stunned. He said that was exactly what he went through; which is reassuring.

Since I cannot brain in any effective way (I can’t even speech the parts of identify, let alone them in put correct the order), I have been binge-watching old TV shows with my writer antennae activated, and seeing what I can learn. In particular I have been watching a lot of M*A*S*H, and have picked up some interesting (to me) ideas from it. I’m thinking of setting some of them down in the form of blog posts, just to keep my hand in while the brain de-stuns itself (and the estate gets sorted out).

What do the Loyal 3.6 think?

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