An interesting fact about the M*A*S*H finale

Not entirely true: "The Monkees" was only on the air for two seasons (and 58 episodes) and it was successful in syndication... And "The Addams Family" and "The Munsters" were also two season shows that were successfully syndicated... I think I even recall the one season series "Sanford" in syndication years ago on BET.

 

HOUSE CALLS, when it aired, had the very cushy time slot in between the still-huge M*A*S*H and LOU GRANT on Monday nights on CBS. It started as a replacement show in the 79-80 season, CBS reshuffled its Monday lineup, temporarily taking off WKRP IN CINCINNATI and then moving it to earlier - 8 PM - when THE WHITE SHADOW finished its run. HOUSE CALLS itself, with only 13 shows that first year, got replaced by FLO for a number of weeks in the spring, and then was re-instated to its berth for the summer.

In the second season, it held its own as a Top 10 show in the ratings, no doubt enjoying its spot right after M*A*S*H. For the third season, it largely continued in its time slot, though it dropped out of the top 10 into the top 30. LOU GRANT had begun to drop in the ratings as well in its final season on the air. As a result, HOUSE CALLS was replaced in the spring with something called MAKING THE GRADE - it didn't! - and then returning for on-again-off-again scheduling through the summer as CBS burned off the remaining new episodes, which by this time had Sharon Gless in the Redgrave role.

I surely would have been a regular viewer of this show as I never missed either M*A*S*H or LOU GRANT in their original runs, and I have a vague recollection of it being an "OK" show - a time-filler - but nothing that stood out for me. I suspect that the show's time-slot was a big factor in its ratings success as networks often sought to build new shows in those "hammock" positions between two big ratings-getters. I'd bet that if HOUSE CALLS had been moved to a different time-slot, say a standalone 8 or 9 o'clock slot, it would have probably sunk like a rock.

 

I was a fan of MASH and Lou Grant but I don't remember ever once watching House Calls. Even then (or more truthfully, especially then) I was kind of picky about what I watched so I probably went to my room during those 30 minutes to spin an album side or something.

As for Trapper John, I literally gave up on that show after the first episode. In the opening scene Trapper woke up from a dream about Korea, calling out the names of MASH characters. After seeing the rest of the episode, it was clear the show was going to have little to do with the Trapper John character I had known, and they were just trying desperately to make some connection.

 

As I read through the Wikipedia description of HOUSE CALLS, much of the casting became familiar. I sort-of recall David Wayne as the cranky old guy, and I recall Ray Buktenica as the goofy younger character. I barely remember Aneta Corsaut as a nurse, but I have trouble recalling Lynn Redgrave in the series at all. Even Wayne Rogers, who I'd be most familiar with is just a distant memory. Perhaps I too went and did something else during that half hour...

 

I hope you patched things up!
I watched it at a public 'viewing party' at a tavern somewhere. Anybody else here go to one of those?

 

Back then (at least around us) very few dorm rooms had a TV. Since we had a color one, we had about 25 freshmen/women jammed into our room. The campus was completely empty outside the window. The local CBS news broadcast right after was dominated by MASH, and WNEW reran the first episode right after the finale ended.

 

True. There are exceptions to the rules. I notice that three of your examples would have been popular with children.(The Monkees, The Munsters and The Addams Family). I wonder if they were more successful in syndication is because their target audience might have been perceived as children. Children have a willingness to watch the same shows over and over again. Saturday morning cartoon series like Scooby-Doo, Gilligan's Island and Star Trek The Animated Series only produced a small number of episodes. The makers knew that they would be able to repeat the episodes over and over again because the kids would watch the episodes over and over again. Oh well, that is my theory. House Calls was a more adult orientated comedy series and it did not have enough episodes in the mind of the syndicators to make a go of it.
Back to the original topic. I was thinking last night about a Mash sequel series. Instead of having Potter, Klinger and Mulcahey together, it might have been more interesting to see what the characters were doing when they went back home. Example Klinger going back to Toledo, Hawkeye in Crabapple Cove, etc. Each week we would see an episode on just one of the characters. The actors would have only had to do 3-4 episodes a year. Not much of a commitment. Unlikely since I think most of the actors wanted to do other things. Just a thought I had daydreaming.

 

I remember enjoying House Calls and finding it funny at the time, but I was 12 and my standards then may not have been what they are now. At least part of my enjoyment was prompted by fondness for the first three seasons of M*A*S*H and nostalgic enjoyment in seeing Wayne Rogers back in the role of an irreverent doctor. I'm sure I'm not the only one who felt that way. But I also have a vague memory of feeling it was funnier than M*A*S*H had become at the time, which wouldn't necessarily have been a high bar.

As you note, it was cancelled despite being a low top twenty show, because it was considered to be under-performing in its time slot, since its lead-in M*A*S*H was reguarly in the top two or three shows.

 

If I had to nitpick I would say that the reliance on puns in the writing would be the only negative for me, but at least they were witty.

 

Hawkeye would probably have become just another victim of TV's biggest mass murderer, Jessica Fletcher ...

Oh wait a minute, that was Cabot Cove. My bad.

 

Hawkeye summed up in one line.

 

The "I will not carry a gun!" speech is good, but I think his liver and fish/"We want something else!" rant still beats it

Seems to me season 3 had some of the best lines (not to mention episodes) of the series...including my personal favourite exchange from "A Full Rich Day", regarding the "lost" Luxembourg soldier:

Hawkeye: I thought you said he was dead...
Trapper: He got better.

 

Yeah, everything was patched up...

Speaking of viewing parties: I recall on the news (6pm newscast, before the finale aired), they were showing people at taverns/bars, probably like the one you attended... I remember they talked to people, and quite a few of them said they were making bets on what would happen during the final episode...

 

Yeah, you have a point there: Those shows you (and I) mentioned were good programming for the after school timeslots...

I'm surprised somebody like "Shout! Factory" hasn't thought about releasing the "House Calls" series on DVD... With the equivalent of two seasons worth of episodes, it might be worth their while. (They've released some one season shows, and I have one they released that was only on half a season.)

 

Watch the MASH pilot last night, thank goodness they got rid of the actor George Morgan who played the original Father Mulcahy (heck, he didn't even have any lines the whole episode) the late William Christopher turned out to be the right choice.

Some cool trivia, both Jamie Farr and William Christopher both appeared in the Doris Day film With Six you get Eggroll, playing hippies!

 

Actually George Morgan can be seen in EVERY episode of M*A*S*H since this scene on the helicopter pad was taken from the pilot. George Morgan is in the far left. Karen Philipp as Lt. Dish is also there to the left of Hawkeye.

 

I still think some clever writing survived up until Season 6. Larry Gelbart was still running the show in season 4. That was the last classic year for me. The writing team of Jim Fritzell and Evert Greenbaum had the strongest shows in Gelbart's absence. They wrote too many classic episodes to list here. Mostly the season openers up to season 6 and Henry Blake's last episode. The were responsible for a majority of the classic Andy Griffith Show classics as well. Laurence Marks, who was a key writer in the first three years with Gelbart, had one episode in season 6. The "Change Day" episode which someone mentioned could have been a Frank Burns story. Maybe it was a left over idea.
As much as I like his blog (By Ken Levine ) Ken Levine and his partner David Isaacs took the show down to a rather bland level. The wit and sarcasm was gone and bad puns ruled the day. They had no idea what to do with Radar and Potter and made Hot Lips hum drum. Once I see that BJ his mustache I know the show is going to be a lesser one. I do give them credit for the "Point Of View" episode. That was a bold choice for the time.

 

For me, season five is the last consistently great season, and the departure of Gene Reynolds is probably a big factor in the decline which begins in season six. I find season six to be a mixed bag. There's some good episodes, but there's also the wretched "Fallen Idol", an episode which sets the template for everything that was bad about the series in its later years. That show exemplifies how Alda's excesses were allowed to go wild once he didn't have Reynolds to rein things in.

Levine and Isaacs also deserve credit for writing one of my all-time favorite episodes, season five's excellent "Out of Sight, Out of Mind." Earlier we were criticizing the later-years M*A*S*H's over-reliance on A-B plotting with one serious and one humorous storyline. This episode is an example of that formula actually working well, something it did not do most of the time. Seasons six and seven are transitional seasons to me... a decline, but notably better than season eight onward. Levine and Isaacs were gone after season seven, and then we got the Thad Mumford era, which was where things really went into the ditch.

 

Totally agree, season six was the last year it felt like "classic MASH"....the seventh season was schizophrenic, some rather good eps but some dogs ("Peace On Us" and the red dye is the Jump The Shark moment for me). After that, there are only sporadic good eps...

I think "Fallen Idol" is great.

 

The one where Potter needs to hold his temper to keep his blood pressure in check so he can pass some sort of essential physical exam was like Sitcom 101. That plot had to have been done on The Lucy Show and many others, and I remember being disappointed that MASH was doing such boilerplate comedy.
But when it was great, it was great.

 

We've probably had this discussion before... I know I've debated the merits (or lack thereof) of that episode with folks here on other M*A*S*H threads. At any rate, the review here dissects what is wrong with the episode in a manner far more thorough than I could do myself, so if anyone is curious why I hate that episode so much, read what he has to say. A key paragraph:
"And here, ladies and gentlemen, we have arrived at a landmark on M*A*S*H: the first occurrence of the tacked-on sententious moral, what in the TV trade (with appropriately thorough cynicism) is technically known as ‘the Moment of Sh!t’. All the characters have been behaving out of register, doing foolish or nasty or just plain pointless things in order to railroad the plot along the required route to arrive at the predetermined moral. Watching, we feel that the whole 4077th has gone crazy in a new and particularly unpleasant way. Everything has been twisted out of shape; we are in a sort of evil mirror universe in which Hawkeye is the fool and the villain, stepping into the shoes recently vacated by Frank Burns."

I would add that one thing I find quite off-putting about the episode (which would recur with increasing frequency as the series rolls on) is scenes where one character explodes and yells at another. These type of scenes were common on seventies dramas and comedy/dramas, and I imagine the actors liked them because it gave them opportunity for a Serious Dramatic Moment. But I was disenheartened to see M*A*S*H start using them. A character blowing up and yelling at another character became an almost-weekly event in the final years of the series. Cheap drama, not realistic, and not consistent with how the characters had behaved in the past.

 

Some valid points, but I recall this ep from when it first aired, and Hawkeye's explosion worked for me because it had yet to become overdone in the series, and I found the fact that the characters were acting different refreshing....the war was having a cumulative effect on them. But of course when this became a go-to device later on, the effect was diluted, but it worked for me the first time.

 

I only saw one episode of "Trapper John" but I remember at the end someone said he learned to work quickly in Korea..as opposed to the other doctor who was in Vietnam.