After M*A*S*H

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by AKA, Feb 18, 2007.

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  1. smilin ed

    smilin ed Senior Member

    Location:
    Durham
    I read the books too. Apart from the second one, they're pretty bad. Even the first isn't exactly great literature.

    It was because of Alda's portrayal of Hawkeye (deftly steered by Larry Gelbart and some excellent writers, particularly Laurence Marks), in the initial three series at least, that I used to enjoy the show so much.

    There are so many bad later episodes that I'm always surprised to see the odd good one - but for me, That Darn Kid was the absolute nadir.

    I think that if you could select all the good and better episodes and box them, there would probably be about seven full series' worth, with the bulk of the missing shows from the last three.
     
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  2. ohnothimagen

    ohnothimagen "Live music is better!"

    Location:
    Canada
    I have no idea how they could have continues with the Burns character- I just can't see him at all in some of the later episodes where Winchester was a perfect fit. Although I'm still convinced that there were season six episodes originally written for Frank that they simply adapted for Charles. "The Light That Failed" being one, "Change Day" being another, probably a couple more.
    Like I said before, bust out a bottle of yer favourite hard liquor and turn it into a drinking game...some of those later episodes you'd be fairly hammered before the second act :laugh:

    I actually watched yer favourite episode this weekend, "Fallen Idol". Hadn't seen the whole thing in years. It is pretty bad (I reckon there are many worse episodes, though), but I did like the subtle little comments in some of the dialogue about how much Hawkeye drank...especially Radar's line about how Hawk could just crawl back into his bottle of booze and pickle himself. It actually made me wonder: given how much and how often those guys drank, you'd think they would have been caught off guard at least once and get slammed with casualties whilst in the process of tying one on. Now that would have made an interesting episode- one of the doctors being so out of it that they end up accidentally killing a patient...
    You can tell just by watching the few scenes with Radar in season 8 before the "Goodbye Radar" episode not only how much he aged but how sick he was of playing the character. Funny thing is, starting in about season six Radar is wholly absent from quite a few episodes- I find I don't even miss him; I'm actually surprised Gary Burghoff stuck around as long as he did. The main problem I have with the Radar character is how much he regressed (for lack of a better term) from being the drinking, cigar smoking, gambling, sex obsessed kid in the early seasons to the child-man they ultimately turned him into.

    That could be the main problem with the series in general, actually- particularly the later seasons: consistency with most of the characters seemed to go out the window...just too many different writers involved I think.
    Totally (though I still have yet to watch an episode of AfterM*A*S*H). I base on that on my opinion that even most of the Potter/Klinger/Mulcahy-centric episodes of the original series I find to be mostly dull...
    I actually think that might be stretching it...IMO season 2 and possibly season 3 is as close to 'perfect' as the show got...otherwise you'll find stinker episodes in all the seasons- it just got exponentially worse as the series went on. I personally would whittle down the 'best' of the first three seasons to two seasons, 4 and 5 as one, 6, 7, and 8 as another and 9, 10 and 11 as the last. That's five full series there.
     
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  3. guy incognito

    guy incognito Senior Member

    Location:
    Mee-chigan
    The first season had some classics as well as some real duds. Season 2 is much more consistent, Season 3 is (IMO, anyway) where the show goes from Very Good to Great. IIRC, that's the season they won the Peabody for.

    With apologies to the Trapper/Henry loyalists, I'd say Season 4 was the show's absolute high point, since (again, IMO) it's the when the mixture of comedy and drama was at its most balanced and seamless. And it's the season that probably contains more of my favorite episodes than any other.

    I share dirwuf's view that Season 7 is where things really started to run off the rails. But M*A*S*H even at its worst is oddly compelling to me, in a way that not a lot of other shows are. I guess I'd put that down to the outstanding cast.
     
    Last edited: Mar 30, 2015
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  4. Luke The Drifter

    Luke The Drifter Forum Resident

    Location:
    United States
    I actually prefer the Winchester/Potter M*A*S*H. I like the serious direction the show went in.
     
  5. smilin ed

    smilin ed Senior Member

    Location:
    Durham
    One thing I like about the later episodes is that Charles becomes his own man; as has been pointed out, he initially seems like Frank II, if a little more upper crust. Unfortunately, he does so while the show is - by and large - losing its bite.

    Radar, by contrast, seems to become more childish, like the writers didn't know what to do with him. The childishness is always there, but it becomes excessive and grating in the post-Trapper/Henry world. To be honest, I was quite pleased to see him go, though the post-Radar episodes are marred by normalising Klinger and losing the wild edge he had in the earlier episodes.
     
  6. inperson

    inperson Senior Member

    Location:
    Ohio
    After watching Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors I always think that that was exactly how Alda acted behind the scenes on MASH.
     
  7. czeskleba

    czeskleba Senior Member

    Location:
    Seattle
    I'd never thought of that before, but you must be correct. Certainly they would have had scripts ready when Linville quit that they would have rewritten and salvaged, and those two seem obvious examples.

    They would have had to make Frank into a completely different character to keep him around. I'm not sure how they would have done that, but then I couldn't have anticipated how they'd change Margaret before it happened either.

    That was one thing that bothered me about that episode. They were shown to be always drinking, so everybody getting down on Hawkeye for having a bad hangover during surgery seemed hypocritical and over-the-top. It's certainly true that as much as they were drinking, and as often as they were caught off-guard by wounded, that there should have been many instances in which all of them would have had to operate drunk or hungover. The writers/producers obviously didn't want to go there because they wanted to keep the characters sympathetic, and there'd be no way to do that in a storyline such as you describe.

    The change in Radar was done deliberately and very early on, whereas the other changes all came late, evolved gradually, and seemed to be motivated by the actors wanting their characters to lose their rough edges and be more like their real selves. I think Radar's naive character worked all right in the early years, but it had really worn out its welcome by his final seasons. It's ironic that the one character you would expect to change in that setting (a naive, unworldly kid) is the only one who did not change or evolve at all.
     
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  8. inperson

    inperson Senior Member

    Location:
    Ohio
    Watching MASH on METV now.

    "Boy those two poops are going to drive me dippy" Col. Blake :laugh:
     
  9. Dr. Pepper

    Dr. Pepper What, me worry?

    I thought I read somewhere at the time, that After Mash was created originally as a starring vehicle for the BJ character, but Mike Farrell turned it down. Rather than scrap the whole thing they continued on with the lesser characters taking a bigger role. Sometimes once the snowball starts rolling it's hard to stop, even if it should be stopped.
     
  10. czeskleba

    czeskleba Senior Member

    Location:
    Seattle
    I don't recall reading anything like that at the time. For what it's worth, this article (which draws heavily from contemporary news accounts for background detail) makes no mention of such a thing in its account of the series' development.

    It's difficult to take characters that were created as supporting characters and make them into the stars of a show, particularly if they are as one-dimensional as Klinger and Mulcahy. Potter's character had more depth, but he was created to react to characters and situations rather than instigate them. I think by the time they realized they needed to come up with some interesting new characters it was too late.
     
  11. Uther

    Uther Forum Resident

    Location:
    Chicagoland
    Whenever I run across a M*A*S*H episode, I decide whether or not to watch it based on one thing: are the exterior shots actually outside, or on that horrible soundstage they used in the later seasons? That seems to be a pretty good indicator, for me, on whether I'd like that particular episode or not.

    As for AfterMASH, I remember watching the first few episodes back in the day and thinking it was horrible. I just watched the "Radar gets married" episode linked a couple pages back. Not nearly as bad as I remember it. I was kind of surprised at how sparingly they used the (still annoying) laugh track.
     
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  12. czeskleba

    czeskleba Senior Member

    Location:
    Seattle
    I only watched the first couple episodes too, and then quit on it. I found it more dull than horrible. I was a big M*A*S*H fan, but it was a series about the least interesting and least appealing characters from that show, and the new characters they came up with initially were not particularly interesting either. Watching the Radar episode on youtube, the Dr. Boyer character seems to have been a step in the right direction, but too little too late. AfterM*A*S*H had a great writing staff, arguably a better one than M*A*S*H had at the end, but I think they really were hamstrung by the characters they were stuck with as their stars.
     
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  13. Uther

    Uther Forum Resident

    Location:
    Chicagoland
    I agree completely. I, frankly, never liked Colonel Potter nor Klinger as characters, even on their good days. I did like Father Mulcahy on M*A*S*H, but he was so milquetoast that there wasn't much room to do anything with him as a main character. I remember thinking at the time how sad it was that these were the best stars they could get for the show. I'm sure they were all somewhere down a ways on the list when the series got pitched.
     
  14. ohnothimagen

    ohnothimagen "Live music is better!"

    Location:
    Canada
    For better or worse I tend to equate Hawkeye's boozing with Gregory House's vicodin (different reasons for their respective vices, I know, but integral part of the characters IMO)
    Exactly- he devolved:righton: If anything, they should have taken the lead from "Fallen Idol" and turned Radar into a more mature, worldly, even a little bit cynical person- after all, getting wounded is bound to cause someone to grow up a little...
    Damn, I am going to have to watch that episode and report back!
     
  15. paulisdead

    paulisdead fast and bulbous

    Wow, this is worse than I thought it would be:

     
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  16. czeskleba

    czeskleba Senior Member

    Location:
    Seattle
    Don't expect too much. The episode pingpongs between the Radar and the Dr. Boyer storylines, but the Radar half of the story is weak, because Radar seems to have devolved mentally even further since returning to the US. I think if a person watched this episode with no prior knowledge of the character, they would conclude he was someone with mild to moderate mental retardation. Seriously. The episode was co-written by Levine and Isaacs, who wrote my all-time favorite episode of M*A*S*H, which leads me to conclude the problems are more with the characters they are saddled with.
     
  17. HGN2001

    HGN2001 Mystery picture member

    I have always been a big fan of M*A*S*H, buying up the whole series on DVD as it was released, and off and on, watching the series through many times on DVD and earlier reruns. Someone here once said that he wouldn't watch a M*A*S*H if BJ was pictured with a mustache in the opening. I remember thinking that that was a little too simplistic and that surely there were some good BJ-with-a-mustache episodes, but sure enough, on another run-through, I did tend to agree that the BJ-mustache episodes were pretty much among the worst. Actually it seemed to be the point that the character changed for the worse.

    Early on, I thought BJ was a pretty good substitute for the Trapper John character, but I also now think that the writers already had the scripts written and simply plugged BJ in for Trapper, just like someone recently pointed out the Charles/Frank Burns character being somewhat interchangeable in the early Charles period.

    But about the time the mustache appeared, another change occurred. Hawkeye and BJ became petty and competitive rather than friends. The two argued with one another more than not, and it almost seems like the final episodes pathos between the two was not true to character. Even in the early part of the finale, BJ goes to visit Hawkeye in the mental ward and Hawkeye is less than thrilled to see his "friend" and even mentions BJ's preoccupation with his child with an air of disgust.

    I still enjoy most all of the M*A*S*H episodes. I don't regret the later changes toward "dramedy", but do feel it often devolved into preachiness.

    Harry
     
  18. dirwuf

    dirwuf Misplaced Chicagoan

    Location:
    Fairfield, CT
    I wouldn't have minded the character or tone changes if the comedy was still funny...the more they tried to do pure comedy in the latter years ("Snap Judgement" for example), the more painful it was to watch.
     
  19. pdenny

    pdenny 22-Year SHTV Participation Trophy Recipient

    Location:
    Hawthorne CA
    I lost interest when they didn't give ol' Loud his own episode :righton:

     
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  20. czeskleba

    czeskleba Senior Member

    Location:
    Seattle
    This is very true. In the later episodes all the characters become bitchier towards one another, and there is a lot more petty bickering and yelling. But it's most noticeable between Hawkeye and BJ because they had been close friends before that. Towards the end it sometimes seems they are hardly friends at all. BJ with a moustache is a reasonable indicator of lesser quality, though for me the wheels fell off the wagon when producer Gene Reynolds left after season five. I believe the moustache didn't appear until season seven.

    Agreed. The comedy in the early years was sharp, witty, and satirical. In the later years it was often corny and broad.
     
  21. ACK!

    ACK! Senior Member

    Location:
    New Hampshire
    The funniest thing about this is the fact that the first laugh on the laugh track is because the first actor laughs at something on TV. Downright hilarious.
     
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  22. smilin ed

    smilin ed Senior Member

    Location:
    Durham
    I think the fact that he rather obviously physically aged didn't help.
    I think this is much more noticeable in Klinger, Potter, Mulcahy and Margaret than with Hawkeye, Charles and BJ. And they get louder too! Potter ends up being cute or irascible, depending on the demands of the episode. Trouble is, Henry was so well-written and clearly a member of a trio and Potter could never be that, even in his early appearances. They just run out of steam at some point. There are still good and ambitious later episodes but there's a lot of so-so stuff that lacks bite
     
  23. DreadPikathulhu

    DreadPikathulhu Senior Member

    Location:
    Seattle
    I came at the show backwards. I'm pretty sure I started watching regularly well into the mustached B.J. years, probably because young me found the show "adult" because it was on at 9PM, and later went back and saw much of the earlier stuff as reruns. When I think of MASH, I still think of the Potter/Winchester/BJ shows.
     
  24. ohnothimagen

    ohnothimagen "Live music is better!"

    Location:
    Canada
    Considering Wayne Rogers was supposed to continue playing Trapper in season 4, and then quit at the last minute I bet quite a few of those episodes were hastily rewritten to substitute B.J. for Trapper. Had Trapper stuck around I could easily see his character going through the same sort of schizophrenic changes that Hot Lips and Radar went through; he probably wouldn't have remained Hawkeye's partner-in-crime forever, and probably would have taken on some of the antagonistic qualities B.J. eventually did in the later seasons (see below) . Could have been interesting, though...
    As I said in one of the other discussions it's as though B.J. was the angel on Hawkeye's shoulder and Trapper was the devil. Personally I think Hawkeye and B.J.'s antagonism in the later seasons added some depth to their characters. Not to belabour the comparisons to House but Hawkeye and B.J.'s relationship reminds me very much of House and Wilson. That said, B.J. could be such an a-s towards Hawkeye sometimes, though- I'm thinking of "No Laughing Matter" from season 9 where he bets Hawkeye that Hawkeye can't remain serious for 24 hours and then spends the rest of the episode deliberately trying to goad Hawkeye into cracking jokes. In Hawkeye's place I probably would have decked the smug pr-ck...:laugh:
    Off the top of my head one of the best (worst) examples of this is "The Joker Is Wild" from the final season. That episode comes across as though the writers were consciously trying to recapture the style of humour in the early episodes only for the whole plot scenario -who is the greatest practical joker of them all?- to come across as extremely meanspirited, like they were deliberately trying to put one over on Hawkeye from the get go. From the opening scene where the camp P.A. is playing the kind of music so often heard in the first season (the semi-Korean version of "Happy Days Are Here Again"), it's obvious that with that episode they were trying to recapture past glories and failed considerably.
     
  25. Splungeworthy

    Splungeworthy Forum Rezidentura

    I didn't watch all of the AfterM.A.S.H. episodes, partially because of all of the critical backlash at the time, but also feeling the book on M.A.S.H. had properly been finished. Same goes for "Joey", the "Friends" spinoff. Funny thing about "Joey" is it got pretty good ratings the first year. The second year it was so bad they cancelled it with several episodes unseen (apparently you can get them from the Canadian 2nd season DVD boxset). You can't really blame CBS for greenlighting AfterM.A.S.H., especially considering the monstrous (and still record-breaking) numbers the finale of M.A.S.H. generated.
     
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