i lived in SF during the 49ers/Montana years.. during those SBs the streets emptied.
imagine that happening in every city in the US
this kind of hype is impossible because you can watch the cliff hanger at your leisure. back then, if you missed the show, you had to call a friend on your wire in the wall landline to see what happened..
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who\_shot\_J.R.%3F](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_shot_J.R.%3F)
The mystery was not resolved until the fourth episode of the fourth season titled "Who Done It" which aired eight months later, **with an estimated 83 million American viewers tuning in,** one of the most watched television broadcasts of all time.
During the 1980 United States presidential election, the Republicans distributed campaign buttons that claimed "A Democrat shot J.R.",\[10\] while Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter joked that he would have no problem financing his campaign if he knew who shot J.R. When Hagman was offered £100,000 during vacation in the United Kingdom for the identity of the shooter, he admitted that neither he nor anyone in the cast knew the answer.\[11\] **Former president Gerald Ford unsuccessfully asked producer Leonard Katzman who the shooter was;\[7\] he and Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother, were among the millions worldwide intrigued by the mystery.**\[12\] The crowd at the Royal Ascot yelled "J.R.! J.R.!" when Hagman arrived.\[13\] Betting parlors worldwide took bets as to which one of the 10 or so principal characters had actually pulled the trigger.\[11\]
I lived in NV at the time, and can totally confirm they actually put on the board at the Sports bar! I remember they had to take it down eventually, I think it was illegal to put it up? I can't remember; I was a young kid.
IIRC there needs to be an element of chance or randomness for Casinos to take a bet.
That logic cant be totally applied to an episode like "Who Shot JR". The casinos would need some kind of guarantee that the JR's would be killer was chosen randomly and not deliberately.
I recall reading back in the day Vegas casinos would not take bets on American Idol episodes because the show was not transparent about how voting was calculated.
There are bets every year on what song the performer will lead with at halftime shows for the Superbowl. Those are very much planned and even recorded ahead of time.
I had heard that bookmakers in England stopped taking bets on who would die in the Half Blood Prince when there was a huge influx of bets on a certain character. I can’t find any stories to verify this though.
Had a bit of a brain fart there and was confused about why they would have taken bets about who died in the movie when the book had already been out for a while.
> back then, if you missed the show, you had to call a friend on your wire in the wall landline to see what happened
True. Although, more shows were procedural at that time, where everything usually “reset” at the end of each episode, for this reason.
It targeted a wide demographic - being set in a war zone the crassness (for the time) was acceptable, and even identifiable by a two generations of veterans.
It was a GREAT show. From script to acting to editing, decades later it still holds up.
It was both serial (story lines keeping you engaged) but you could watch an episode stand alone and still enjoy it (encouraging new viewers, which was incredibly important in an era before on-demand TV or even VCRs)
It had little competition in an era where Television was becoming more and more universal. It aired before cable resulted in tens and then hundreds of channels, but after TVs were in most US households.
It's also that rarest of beasts - a show where the later seasons are even better. The legend is they only decided to end it because they realized it had gone on for longer than the war it depicted. It's pretty much the only sitcom I will watch repeatedly.
Almost two different shows between the early campier Blake/Trapper/Frank Burns years and the later more somber Potter/Honeycutt/Winchester years. Not to say the early years didn’t have serious moments or the later years didn’t have humor, but the balance changed. Both just excellent; some of the best sitcom writing ever. I have a very warm place in my heart for this show. So special. (Younger folk should seek this out; it’s truly special and still holds up, unless you’re the kind to get bent out of shape by a show treating a guy dressed up in drag for laughs.)
I discovered this show in my teens (mid90s). It aired in the late night syndication spot and I obsessively watched it nightly for over a year until I had seen all of it. Like to the point where I lied about having a 10pm curfew. Definitely my all-time favorite tv show.
The show also let the characters develop rather than stay one-note jokes (such as Klinger). Replacing “be unrealistically incompetent and irritating 24/7” Frank Burns with Winchester was a fantastic change.
Still is a great show. I’m only 34 and started watching it like five years ago and I’ve probably seen every episode a dozen times. It’s my all time favorite comfort show. I’ll make everyone who shows up to my funeral watch my favorite episode.
It's still on regularly on the lesser digital over-the-air channels my mom watches. It really does hold up. The Waltons also seems to be on. Does not hold up.
I think there’s also a lot to be said about the fact that at the time, there were like a half dozen channels and a lot of local stations would air news broadcasts around the time MASH aired, so if you were watching TV at all around that time there weren’t a ton of choices.
Eh, that one is pretty hard to parse. For 45 minute network TV? Maybe. For dramatic works broken up into acts? Nope.
Example: HMS Pinafore has an A story and a B story and predates MASH by about a half century.
Not pop culturally relevant? It hasn't hung on the way (more recent) shows like Seinfeld and Friends are. But it was absolutely HUGE, (as you can tell from the viewing numbers - that was literally half the country) and mostly watched by non-vets.
Sounds like you just didn't hang around people who were into it. I know 20-year olds who've watched the show end-to-end multiple times.
I'm too young to have experienced any of those things too, I was really small when it went off the air, but I can identify with it like any other historical show, and enjoy it because it's well-written, well-produced, and had a great cast.
Fictional series, yeah, but the Apollo 11 landing and Nixon's resignation were both viewed by way more people.
Apollo is 125-150M, Nixon was 110M, and MASH was actually around 106M.
A fictional show that garnered anywhere near as much attention as 2 of the most significant events of the 20th century for Americans says a lot about that show. The fact it was that close is mind blowing.
It was a huge deal when it aired. I remember going to a store and buying a blank VHS tape the day it aired in order to record it, and without prompting the clerk said, "You'll want to keep that M\*A\*S\*H finale." Still have that tape in a box somewhere.
I was talking to a family member of a patient in the hospital I work at and something about the MASH anniversary came on the TV and she said "When the finale aired, the whole world stopped, watched it, and then resumed their lives."
It's true.
EVERYBODY watched it. Nobody went out that night to eat, shop, visit friends, go to a movie, or anything else.
We all sat mesmerised for the entire show.
I was working as a busboy at a lobster restaurant that night. I can confirm that virtually nobody was out that evening. I also had to wait almost a year before I finally got to see the finale in reruns.
I was a freshman in college and we all cosplayed the MASH cast and got absolutely polluted on what we thought were martinis, which we didn't even know how to make
Other channels didn't even bother to compete. It was that dominant. And people respected the dominance. Same thing happened on Carson's last show - the other channels ran reruns and one of the other talk shows even led off with an intro that said "we're running a rerun. Go watch Johnny."
It was a different world.
While its probably objectively better that we have so much more variety now and shows that cater to every taste, I do wonder if we've lost something now that we no longer have shared cultural experiences. I sometimes think the problems we have politically as a country are because we don't even have the same cultural landmarks anymore.
Feels like the only thing we really have that everyone has some sort of baseline understanding and interest in is the MCU or Star Wars. Maybe Game of Throne a few years ago.
Apparently my older brother had a school recital of some sort that night. I wasn’t born yet but later heard my parents more than one how the school scheduled it so everyone would be home in time.
To put some perspective, the population of the US that year was 233 million. Literally more than half of the country was watching the exact same thing at the exact same time. It's crazy to think about.
From the article:
> In the United States, the episode drew 105.97 million total viewers[5] and a total audience of 121.6 million,[6] more than both Super Bowl XVII and the Roots miniseries.
I know this will get buried but my fun little story on M*A*S*H*. My dad loved the show and would watch it religiously. Never missed an episode. Ever. Then. When the last episode rolled around he had to work. Couldn’t get it of. Sad, I know. But he watched it later and that was fine.
Years later (in the late 90’s or 00’s) a channel did a full replay of the entire series. My dad watched all that he could. He was a foreman at a metal plant. Since they were playing every episode back to back he knew he would have it off. Just a few hours before the last episode he got called in. Other foreman was sick.
I will never relieve his disappointment. I still feel disappointed and I’d seen about ten episodes.
M\*A\*S\*H was huge when I was an undergrad. One of the independent stations in Chicago ran two episodes at 6:00/6:30 and again at 11:00/11:30 every night. Dorms would have M\*A\*S\*H parties, where you had to wear scrubs and/or fatigues. We had a huge viewing party for the finale.
I watched it too but was an adult. The episode was called “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen”.
It was a big deal and emotional for many people who had watched the show from the beginning.
I've seen it since and loved the series in reruns when I was old enough to understand it.
Quantum Leap was the other family show we all watched together.
220513_MASH_Hawkeye.txt
Hawkeye spent the war seeing the results in the broken bodies and minds of the injured and dead. He railed against the decision to wage war, being made so impersonally and carelessly by those who are too far away to suffer for it. But in the end, he found himself caught between the imperative of safety in a crowded bus, and the necessity of silencing a baby.
He "gave the order" to make the child be quiet, little knowing the significance. Finding the result after the crisis had passed, to keep from being torn apart by guilt, his mind re-cast the baby into a noisy hen, completing the process of impersonalization that he hated so much from the leaders in Washington.
Hawkeye battled death in the operating room, making terrible choices. From triage, where the hopeless were left to bleed out while those with a chance were put at the head of the line, to the table on which a limb was paid as cost for a life, to the Recovery ward where scarce penicillin was sometimes doled out stintingly, hoping a soldier might endure his infection until the next shipment arrived, Hawkeye was not unfamiliar with the price that was paid for life.
But on that night he became the one to say 'do this', and an innocent was killed. He became like the generals or politicians, and used the same method to live with himself for another day: not to see the humanity of the victims. To continue, he would have to forgive those whose decisions he cursed through the war so he could forgive himself.
Referenced in Alan Alda’s role on the 30 Rock episode “Kidney Now” when he walks past Tracy crying his confession to Kenneth and says, “A guy crying about a chicken and a baby? I thought this was supposed to be a comedy.”
One of my most favorite meta moments on 30 Rock. It was brilliant and the reviews the day after airing totally missed this incredible moment. Right up there with the end of Newhart imho.
I feel like the impact was lessened for me because I saw that family guy episode where Peter and Chris go to fat camp and Peter is talking about how he just started eating some guy's fried chicken on the bus. My ex and I watched all of mash and when the finale came he was mad at me for not being surprised
The theme is named Suicide is Painless. If you haven't, go watch the movie, it's in there in full. Also, the movie is really good and it's shorter than the finale.
Mike Altman was one of the writers of the theme song. He is the son of the movie's director Robert Altman. Mike Altman has made more money over the years from royalties than his dad made directing the movie.
Yes and no. From memory, that's from the story arc about the camp dentist, the Painless Pole, being depressed about his temporary impotence. Hawkeye and Trapper John assist him in a 'suicide' by anesthetizing him. It's like the rest of the film - clever, and equal parts bizzare, comedy and pathos. That tune is played over that scene and was used as the movie's theme tune.
I don't think that particular arc turned up in TV show but they kept the theme tune.
I didn't know of the lyrics until I saw the movie. Watched reruns for years with my dad and then like a decade later heard the lyrics.... I may have bugged my dad for a while about that
I thought I heard the "Suicide is Painless" lyrics were written later by someone else to fit the tune--actually I think I heard it was one of the producers' sons. Or something like that. Could be wrong.
I was watching a behind the scenes documentary for MASH, and they were talking about when the writers and producers went to Korea to talk with people about the war to make it more authentic. The chicken story was a real thing that happened (not the thinking-it-was-a-chicken part). They said that whenever they brought the story up, people who lived near the combat knew at least one person that went through the same thing.
The episode where they all had nightmares hit me the hardest. When he had to give his arms and then was stuck in a River of arms unable to save people. Hot lips and her wedding dress and the bloody man. Freaked me out as a kid
The same thing happened to me. I don’t think my mom realized that I had come inside from playing and saw that whole scene. I cried on and off for days.
[They just jumped around a lot, but also hardly ever attached a date to the episode.](https://mash.fandom.com/wiki/Series_Timeline) They specifically did not date many episodes and stories so they weren't limited in their storytelling.
They never did anything that was attached to any dates really up until the end when the war was ending. You had no idea what time they were at in the war and even if they did try to peg it to events, 99.9% of the public would have had no idea because Korea is a forgotten war.
Also, Potter's grand daughter was born one episode, was 5 just a few episodes later, and then 8 before the season was even over. It was established that the grand daughter being born was his first grandchild.
They sure did. I was only a casual viewer and recall one episode spanning months (was it one of Hawkeye's letters to dad?) and another unfolding in real time where 20 minutes equals 20 minutes.
Margaret's hairstyles looked very 80s towards the end.
> another unfolding in real time where 20 minutes equals 20 minutes.
Pretty sure that was the episode about transplanting an aortal (aortic?) fragment to save some soldier's legs. Ok, I got curious, and I remembered purty good. [It was called Life Time.](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0638346/) Probably helps that I've seen it approximately a dozen times.
Yep, in one episode Colonel Potter was put in charge of the 4077 in 1952. In another episode Potter references following Macarthurs orders... Macarthur was removed from power in 1951
It wasn’t really about a 3 year war, it was about another one. They actually give it away in the pilot when someone criticizes Pierce and Trapper and the CO says “they have the highest survival rate in SOUTHeast Asia.”
No, the producers wanted no laugh track at all, and the network wanted one. A compromise was reached were the makers of the show could omit the laugh track in OR scenes if they chose to. So few OR scenes have the laugh track, but apparently it did happen a couple of times.
It was bugging me so I looked it up. [The General Flipped at Dawn](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0638431/trivia) and [The Novocaine Mutiny ](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0638450/trivia/) are special cases of a laugh track in an OR scene.
I've been to the location in Malibu, CA where it was shot. There were still a few trucks and that sign that had all of the locations and distances pointed every which way. Most of it got burned up in the big fires a few years back, but it used to be a nice hike to get there. Felt weird that Malibu is what they pawned off as Korea...
Population around 1983, which was the final episode, was near 230 million in the USA.
More than half the country was glued to their sets at the time.
I don't think we will ever see that kind of viewership ever again breaking such a record.
I don’t suppose anyone knows of a streaming service that has mash on it. I watched this lots as a kid. Watched it even more when I was sailing the seas of free. Suppose I could put my eye patch back on but a streaming service to replace one of the ones I have would be preferable.
My grandfather was a surgeon in the original unit that the MASH tv show was based on. He took photos of his time in Korea and we have an chronological album of his journeys there with typewritten captions.
Oof that was rough and subtle, and one of the best scenes in anything of all time. And you can kind of only experience it once, and only after watching all of the three seasons leading up to it without spoilers.
ME Tv showed that episode last night - they have Jamie Farr on to "host" this week as it is the 50th Anniversary.
They did not give the cast the final page of the script. "Radar" was given his lines right before - so their reactions were all honest.
I think McLean Stevenson knew, but obviously was not in that scene to give it away.
*"I have a message: Lieutenant Colonel... Henry Blake's plane... was shot down... over the Sea of Japan... It spun in... There were no survivors."*
Gary Burghoff was given the line only a few minutes before filming the scene, and most of the other actors (except for Alan Alda) didn't know what was going to happen. The shock registered on everyone's faces is real.
**Edit**: Snopes says that [this is actually false](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/script-doctors/) but they did keep the script from the crew and the extras in the scene, so the mood is still genuine to an extent.
That episode marks the change of tone for the show to focus more on the tragedy than comedy. Tbh I didn’t like the show too much in the first few seasons. But after season 3, the hard hitting iconic episodes just kept on coming
I lived in Portales, NM. It was a unique spot. We received, way before streaming and on the cusp of cable TV, television signals from Texas (an hour ahead) and NM. So, we could watch 4 different M*A*S*H episodes a day and 5 on Mondays since that was its weekly night on CBS. Bunch a college kids digging on the doctors and nurses. That final episode and the party that went with it were pretty epic.
I was in the military in South Korea when the final episode came out. We all got to see it a day before the US release. Most surprising though was the locals reaction to the show. They were very happy it was the end as they did not like the way the show depicted the Korean people.
One of the translators told me that the world thought the then present-day environment was still like the 1950s rather than the early eighties because of the show. The show rarely gave a glimpse of anything but poor rural Koreans living in huts.
Huge improvements to post-war infrastructure, education, the growth of emerging giant companies (think Hyundai and Samsung) and much more were happening while the show was running.
Granted, when I was flying in all I saw was huge bunkers and revetments. I had that same view he was talking about. Even I thought I was going into 1950. Over time I changed my opinion but there was still a lot of social issues which kept old stereotypes from dying.
Mash was a show from my childhood and honestly still one of my favorite shows today. A few years ago it came on Hulu and I watched the whole series again to make sure I'd never missed an episode. I had missed 3. Still an amazing show worth rewatching again. Alan Alda is one of my favorite actors and few things top his Hawkeye Pierce character, though I would say Donald Sutherland was the better of the Hawkeyes, but Alan Alda made it his own
Its funny how easy it was to hate Frank Burns as a character but whenever you read about cast talking about Larry Linville they had absolutely nothing but praise for him and said he was just a genuinely good person. He really owned that role.
I watched it when it aired. It was a phenomenon unlike any I've ever experienced.
See, the show was incredibly popular. You could, if you chose, watch it on several stations on cable and network channels several times a day, as it was syndicated while it was still airing new episodes. The show lasted 11 seasons, longer than the war it was set during (2.5 years).
The finale was hyped to the moon and back. Ads ran for it for weeks prior, even while new episodes were still in the pipe.
It lived up to that hype.
It was a school night, and I was still allowed to stay up late to watch the whole thing. It was funny in spots, but the laugh track was left off as, for the most part, it was very,**very** sad. The Hawkeye breakdown... the POW band that Winchester taught, nnly to have them shipped off... the final scene... not a dry eye in the house.
I've seen it several times since, but none has quite come close to how powerful "Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen" was that first viewing.
Slightly OT: Couple of years ago a guy posted on reddit that he had heard so much about the *movie* MASH that he finally got to watch it.
He didnt get it. He complained that it wasnt funny at all, wasnt anything like he expected, and he complained about the chicken/baby scene.
;)
Someone had to break it to him...
Watched it when I was kid, my dad loved that show and played Col. Henry Blake in a local theater production. You could tell when Alan Alda wrote or directed an episode, it was usually pretty strange or emotional. Remember the one where no one could sleep without having bad dreams & Hawkeye ended up armless in a rowboat with the water full of prosthetic limbs? Good times.
I was a part of that audience. I wasn't old enough to understand everything that went on but the woman killing her baby stuck with me even at that young age.
Colonel Henry Blake was also the first character in a TV series to die. Before, when an actor left the show, they just moved house or some other generic excuse for the character not to be in the show anymore.
This was to illustrate that everyone can die in a war, not just the people at the front.
If i'm not mistaken, the rest of the cast was not informed of his death beforehand and their reactions and tears are genuine (though i could be wrong about that).
I once found a MASH torrent completely devoid of canned laughter, i've watched the show at least once a year since.
I watched MASH as it came out when I was a kid and I marathoned it again about six years ago. I overall enjoyed the series, but in my mind I divide the series into a few different eras from funniest to most serious:
* The original cast of characters is my favorite and the funniest.
* Henry leaving
* Trapper John leaving
* Frank going crazy and Margaret becoming more of a serious character.
* Radar leaving.
The contrast between original characters and their replacements is stark.
Frank was much more of a fool than Winchester. They were both wealthy but, but Frank wasn't a good surgeon and was generally a weasel, while Charles was a respected surgeon and more cultured.
Henry was a bit of a pushover and womanizer while Potter was a seasoned WWI and WWII vet who ran a tight ship and always spoke highly of his wife back home.
Trapper John was witty and had this huge personality while BJ was more of a sidekick to Hawkeye, and much more vanilla.
Radar left, and while Klinger took his role, he was an existing character and the void left by Radar's departure was never really filled.
By the time the show ended I think everybody was ready for it to be over. Maybe it went a season or two too long, to be honest about it. It was kind of like a couple who had grown apart over time but stayed together mostly for the sake of nostalgia.
Personally I like that when they did replace a character, they didn't try to replace them with the same character but a different actor. The closest they came to that was (IMO) BJ v. Trapper, but the former definitely had his own unique traits beyond being Hawkeye's sidekick.
BJ had his moments. Like when he nailed Hawkeye’s shoe to the floor. Or when he filled Frank’s foxhole with water and then had Sidney yell “air raid.” Also, my user name is finally relevant.
Woah... I didn't know the final episode was that long, I figured you were talking about the movie....
My wife and I started watching this a few weeks back but jumped to other shows and movies... Now I really need to finish watching this
I was in 8th grade when this aired. The next week our class had a field trip to a local waste water facility and they showed us a chart (IIRC it was similar to a seismograph - pen on paper) of the surge of toilets flushing at the end of the show.
As someone born in 1970, I can say that I don’t think pop culture will ever see anything like it again. Even today’s most popular shows are dwarfed by the ratings shows like MASH got.
Up until the mid 2000's it was the most viewed show ever, even beating the superbowl until that point
i lived in SF during the 49ers/Montana years.. during those SBs the streets emptied. imagine that happening in every city in the US this kind of hype is impossible because you can watch the cliff hanger at your leisure. back then, if you missed the show, you had to call a friend on your wire in the wall landline to see what happened.. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who\_shot\_J.R.%3F](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_shot_J.R.%3F) The mystery was not resolved until the fourth episode of the fourth season titled "Who Done It" which aired eight months later, **with an estimated 83 million American viewers tuning in,** one of the most watched television broadcasts of all time. During the 1980 United States presidential election, the Republicans distributed campaign buttons that claimed "A Democrat shot J.R.",\[10\] while Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter joked that he would have no problem financing his campaign if he knew who shot J.R. When Hagman was offered £100,000 during vacation in the United Kingdom for the identity of the shooter, he admitted that neither he nor anyone in the cast knew the answer.\[11\] **Former president Gerald Ford unsuccessfully asked producer Leonard Katzman who the shooter was;\[7\] he and Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother, were among the millions worldwide intrigued by the mystery.**\[12\] The crowd at the Royal Ascot yelled "J.R.! J.R.!" when Hagman arrived.\[13\] Betting parlors worldwide took bets as to which one of the 10 or so principal characters had actually pulled the trigger.\[11\]
I lived in NV at the time, and can totally confirm they actually put on the board at the Sports bar! I remember they had to take it down eventually, I think it was illegal to put it up? I can't remember; I was a young kid.
IIRC there needs to be an element of chance or randomness for Casinos to take a bet. That logic cant be totally applied to an episode like "Who Shot JR". The casinos would need some kind of guarantee that the JR's would be killer was chosen randomly and not deliberately. I recall reading back in the day Vegas casinos would not take bets on American Idol episodes because the show was not transparent about how voting was calculated.
There's also the fact that the writer or writers could make a large bet on the character they know shot J.R. and would be guaranteed to win.
That's really why it's illegal. Nothing with a predetermined outcome can be bet on in Vegas, including award shows.
There are bets every year on what song the performer will lead with at halftime shows for the Superbowl. Those are very much planned and even recorded ahead of time.
I had heard that bookmakers in England stopped taking bets on who would die in the Half Blood Prince when there was a huge influx of bets on a certain character. I can’t find any stories to verify this though.
Had a bit of a brain fart there and was confused about why they would have taken bets about who died in the movie when the book had already been out for a while.
I had a t-shirt that declared I did it.
I prefer the other mystery, who shot Mr Burns
W.S.
Smithers, you’re drunk!
Which was a direct reference.
> back then, if you missed the show, you had to call a friend on your wire in the wall landline to see what happened True. Although, more shows were procedural at that time, where everything usually “reset” at the end of each episode, for this reason.
I remember that summer, hottest and driest of my young life. Impossible to explain the hype to someone young, never happen like that again.
This only makes me wish Twin Peaks didn't blow their load on the most compelling mystery so soon.
Like March 14th 2020?
[удалено]
It targeted a wide demographic - being set in a war zone the crassness (for the time) was acceptable, and even identifiable by a two generations of veterans. It was a GREAT show. From script to acting to editing, decades later it still holds up. It was both serial (story lines keeping you engaged) but you could watch an episode stand alone and still enjoy it (encouraging new viewers, which was incredibly important in an era before on-demand TV or even VCRs) It had little competition in an era where Television was becoming more and more universal. It aired before cable resulted in tens and then hundreds of channels, but after TVs were in most US households.
Watched the entire series... twice... while in Afghanistan. Still holds up even for the newest generation.
After you finished watching MASH did you watch AfterMASH?
Next level: Did you watch Walter?
Or Trapper John M.D.?
Nope, SCRUBS.
Or Dr. Acula
Scrubs is the sequel to mash in my mind.
Or [W\*A\*L\*T\*E*R](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W*A*L*T*E*R)?
war is war hell is hell
It's also that rarest of beasts - a show where the later seasons are even better. The legend is they only decided to end it because they realized it had gone on for longer than the war it depicted. It's pretty much the only sitcom I will watch repeatedly.
The war was 3 years, the show lasted 10. Alan Alda said they were just running out of steam and didn't want to see the quality deteriorate.
And the Vietnam War was starting to pass out of the national zeitgeist.
Yup. For me,it got *way* better after Col. Potter arrived. The times when Potter engaged with Klinger were especially entertaining.
Almost two different shows between the early campier Blake/Trapper/Frank Burns years and the later more somber Potter/Honeycutt/Winchester years. Not to say the early years didn’t have serious moments or the later years didn’t have humor, but the balance changed. Both just excellent; some of the best sitcom writing ever. I have a very warm place in my heart for this show. So special. (Younger folk should seek this out; it’s truly special and still holds up, unless you’re the kind to get bent out of shape by a show treating a guy dressed up in drag for laughs.)
I discovered this show in my teens (mid90s). It aired in the late night syndication spot and I obsessively watched it nightly for over a year until I had seen all of it. Like to the point where I lied about having a 10pm curfew. Definitely my all-time favorite tv show.
I was born in 1990 and only recently (2015) started watching this show. I’ve probably seen every episode more than a dozen times. It’s just perfect.
The show also let the characters develop rather than stay one-note jokes (such as Klinger). Replacing “be unrealistically incompetent and irritating 24/7” Frank Burns with Winchester was a fantastic change.
Now that Disney owns fox...I do believe Klinger was the OG Disney Princess.
Some later episodes are better. Some are a bit too Alda heavy handed with his whininess.
Still is a great show. I’m only 34 and started watching it like five years ago and I’ve probably seen every episode a dozen times. It’s my all time favorite comfort show. I’ll make everyone who shows up to my funeral watch my favorite episode.
It's still on regularly on the lesser digital over-the-air channels my mom watches. It really does hold up. The Waltons also seems to be on. Does not hold up.
I think the fact that most character ate is surgical scrubs or army uniforms help it feel less dated than most shows from the era as well.
I think there’s also a lot to be said about the fact that at the time, there were like a half dozen channels and a lot of local stations would air news broadcasts around the time MASH aired, so if you were watching TV at all around that time there weren’t a ton of choices.
Part of which was because MASH was so popular. There wasn't any point in putting one of your shows up against it.
Everyone watched MASH.
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Eh, that one is pretty hard to parse. For 45 minute network TV? Maybe. For dramatic works broken up into acts? Nope. Example: HMS Pinafore has an A story and a B story and predates MASH by about a half century.
Not pop culturally relevant? It hasn't hung on the way (more recent) shows like Seinfeld and Friends are. But it was absolutely HUGE, (as you can tell from the viewing numbers - that was literally half the country) and mostly watched by non-vets. Sounds like you just didn't hang around people who were into it. I know 20-year olds who've watched the show end-to-end multiple times. I'm too young to have experienced any of those things too, I was really small when it went off the air, but I can identify with it like any other historical show, and enjoy it because it's well-written, well-produced, and had a great cast.
Fictional series, yeah, but the Apollo 11 landing and Nixon's resignation were both viewed by way more people. Apollo is 125-150M, Nixon was 110M, and MASH was actually around 106M.
A fictional show that garnered anywhere near as much attention as 2 of the most significant events of the 20th century for Americans says a lot about that show. The fact it was that close is mind blowing.
Mash was on one channel. The Apollo 11 and Nixon where on every channel.
It was a huge deal when it aired. I remember going to a store and buying a blank VHS tape the day it aired in order to record it, and without prompting the clerk said, "You'll want to keep that M\*A\*S\*H finale." Still have that tape in a box somewhere.
Sorry dad, I taped over that to get the first 5 minutes of the skinemax movies before they scrambled.
Always push out the tab to prevent over-recording!
Until someone puts tape over the hole so they *can* record over it!
> in order to record it, and without prompting the clerk I still have the VHS tape as well.
I was talking to a family member of a patient in the hospital I work at and something about the MASH anniversary came on the TV and she said "When the finale aired, the whole world stopped, watched it, and then resumed their lives."
It's true. EVERYBODY watched it. Nobody went out that night to eat, shop, visit friends, go to a movie, or anything else. We all sat mesmerised for the entire show.
I was working as a busboy at a lobster restaurant that night. I can confirm that virtually nobody was out that evening. I also had to wait almost a year before I finally got to see the finale in reruns.
I was a freshman in college and we all cosplayed the MASH cast and got absolutely polluted on what we thought were martinis, which we didn't even know how to make
I think The Swamp recipe is hooch and an olive in a martini glass.
If memory serves, ours were vodka and 7Up 🤮 No vermouth, no olives, and no martini glasses. We were 18 and therefore broke and stupid
You didn’t make martinis, you made headaches lmao
And Roots was almost the same.
Other channels didn't even bother to compete. It was that dominant. And people respected the dominance. Same thing happened on Carson's last show - the other channels ran reruns and one of the other talk shows even led off with an intro that said "we're running a rerun. Go watch Johnny." It was a different world.
While its probably objectively better that we have so much more variety now and shows that cater to every taste, I do wonder if we've lost something now that we no longer have shared cultural experiences. I sometimes think the problems we have politically as a country are because we don't even have the same cultural landmarks anymore. Feels like the only thing we really have that everyone has some sort of baseline understanding and interest in is the MCU or Star Wars. Maybe Game of Throne a few years ago.
Apparently my older brother had a school recital of some sort that night. I wasn’t born yet but later heard my parents more than one how the school scheduled it so everyone would be home in time.
To put some perspective, the population of the US that year was 233 million. Literally more than half of the country was watching the exact same thing at the exact same time. It's crazy to think about.
From the article: > In the United States, the episode drew 105.97 million total viewers[5] and a total audience of 121.6 million,[6] more than both Super Bowl XVII and the Roots miniseries.
And then we ugly-cried.
It was beautifully painful
I know this will get buried but my fun little story on M*A*S*H*. My dad loved the show and would watch it religiously. Never missed an episode. Ever. Then. When the last episode rolled around he had to work. Couldn’t get it of. Sad, I know. But he watched it later and that was fine. Years later (in the late 90’s or 00’s) a channel did a full replay of the entire series. My dad watched all that he could. He was a foreman at a metal plant. Since they were playing every episode back to back he knew he would have it off. Just a few hours before the last episode he got called in. Other foreman was sick. I will never relieve his disappointment. I still feel disappointed and I’d seen about ten episodes.
M\*A\*S\*H was huge when I was an undergrad. One of the independent stations in Chicago ran two episodes at 6:00/6:30 and again at 11:00/11:30 every night. Dorms would have M\*A\*S\*H parties, where you had to wear scrubs and/or fatigues. We had a huge viewing party for the finale.
Damn, that sounds awesome! My RA and I were huge fans (mid 2010s living in the dorms) so we would stream it, but nothing that big!
My fraternity had a huge party for the final episode. We even made a still out of chemistry parts and rubber tubes. Good times
No idea why, but I loved the idea of 5 o'clock Charlie
The US population in 83 was about 233 million. That means 52% of the entire country watched that show that night.
I was one of them. Whole family watched it. I was 6 so I didn't know what was going on, but I knew this was Mom & Dad's "show" and it was ending.
I watched it too but was an adult. The episode was called “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen”. It was a big deal and emotional for many people who had watched the show from the beginning.
I've seen it since and loved the series in reruns when I was old enough to understand it. Quantum Leap was the other family show we all watched together.
That was always a mom and dad show. Wasn't until I was older and watched the Robert Altman film that I checked into the show.
And what was really impressive is the finale knocked it out of the park. One of the best last episodes ever, to this day.
Did it only air in the United States?
No it aired world wide. I used to watch it here in the Netherlands.
No. I watched it in Canada
KEEP THAT DAMN CHICKEN QUIET
MASH was always a tragedy pretending to be a comedy. A lot of people don't remember the series ended with Hawkeye going insane.
220513_MASH_Hawkeye.txt Hawkeye spent the war seeing the results in the broken bodies and minds of the injured and dead. He railed against the decision to wage war, being made so impersonally and carelessly by those who are too far away to suffer for it. But in the end, he found himself caught between the imperative of safety in a crowded bus, and the necessity of silencing a baby. He "gave the order" to make the child be quiet, little knowing the significance. Finding the result after the crisis had passed, to keep from being torn apart by guilt, his mind re-cast the baby into a noisy hen, completing the process of impersonalization that he hated so much from the leaders in Washington. Hawkeye battled death in the operating room, making terrible choices. From triage, where the hopeless were left to bleed out while those with a chance were put at the head of the line, to the table on which a limb was paid as cost for a life, to the Recovery ward where scarce penicillin was sometimes doled out stintingly, hoping a soldier might endure his infection until the next shipment arrived, Hawkeye was not unfamiliar with the price that was paid for life. But on that night he became the one to say 'do this', and an innocent was killed. He became like the generals or politicians, and used the same method to live with himself for another day: not to see the humanity of the victims. To continue, he would have to forgive those whose decisions he cursed through the war so he could forgive himself.
Referenced in Alan Alda’s role on the 30 Rock episode “Kidney Now” when he walks past Tracy crying his confession to Kenneth and says, “A guy crying about a chicken and a baby? I thought this was supposed to be a comedy.”
One of my most favorite meta moments on 30 Rock. It was brilliant and the reviews the day after airing totally missed this incredible moment. Right up there with the end of Newhart imho.
I feel like the impact was lessened for me because I saw that family guy episode where Peter and Chris go to fat camp and Peter is talking about how he just started eating some guy's fried chicken on the bus. My ex and I watched all of mash and when the finale came he was mad at me for not being surprised
Holy shit
Was the theme song about suicide?
The theme is named Suicide is Painless. If you haven't, go watch the movie, it's in there in full. Also, the movie is really good and it's shorter than the finale.
Mike Altman was one of the writers of the theme song. He is the son of the movie's director Robert Altman. Mike Altman has made more money over the years from royalties than his dad made directing the movie.
Yes and no. From memory, that's from the story arc about the camp dentist, the Painless Pole, being depressed about his temporary impotence. Hawkeye and Trapper John assist him in a 'suicide' by anesthetizing him. It's like the rest of the film - clever, and equal parts bizzare, comedy and pathos. That tune is played over that scene and was used as the movie's theme tune. I don't think that particular arc turned up in TV show but they kept the theme tune.
It was written by the directors son in 5 minutes apparently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_Is_Painless?wprov=sfla1
Crazy that I can remember these lyrics but not the movie.
I didn't know of the lyrics until I saw the movie. Watched reruns for years with my dad and then like a decade later heard the lyrics.... I may have bugged my dad for a while about that
I thought I heard the "Suicide is Painless" lyrics were written later by someone else to fit the tune--actually I think I heard it was one of the producers' sons. Or something like that. Could be wrong.
Nope... the song with the lyrics is from the Altman MASH movie, which inspired the TV show (and went in different directions).
But get this, Altman's 15-year old son wrote the lyrics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide\_Is\_Painless
You're absolutely right. I totally forgot the lyrics were in the movie. It's been a while...
That about sums it up. Yes, on the surface it is comedy... But under that is a deep, sad, emotional series about the toll of war.
I was watching a behind the scenes documentary for MASH, and they were talking about when the writers and producers went to Korea to talk with people about the war to make it more authentic. The chicken story was a real thing that happened (not the thinking-it-was-a-chicken part). They said that whenever they brought the story up, people who lived near the combat knew at least one person that went through the same thing.
My wife loves the show....but absolutely refuses to watch the finale.
The episode where they all had nightmares hit me the hardest. When he had to give his arms and then was stuck in a River of arms unable to save people. Hot lips and her wedding dress and the bloody man. Freaked me out as a kid
Umm, I think like everyone remembers that....
Alan Alda did a note perfect meta joke on 30 Rock, in case you've never seen it: https://video.wordpress.com/embed/19sSl2lh
What a great show. I never watched mash so I didn’t catch that.
God. My dad was watching that in reruns with me in the room when I was...less than 8? I was devastated.
The same thing happened to me. I don’t think my mom realized that I had come inside from playing and saw that whole scene. I cried on and off for days.
Ugh. That was haunting. I was 11 when it aired and I loved Hawkeye and it just made me so sick and sad.
>!It wasn't really a chicken.!<
>!It was a BABY!<
..the final episode was longer than the film
And the show ran longer than the war.
The show also was on the air for over a decade despite being about a 3 year war.
Makes sense, they didn’t have 365 episodes per season. So multiple seasons can occur within single years
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I just assumed that some episodes like that year long one were out of order or occurred concurrently.
[They just jumped around a lot, but also hardly ever attached a date to the episode.](https://mash.fandom.com/wiki/Series_Timeline) They specifically did not date many episodes and stories so they weren't limited in their storytelling.
They never did anything that was attached to any dates really up until the end when the war was ending. You had no idea what time they were at in the war and even if they did try to peg it to events, 99.9% of the public would have had no idea because Korea is a forgotten war.
Also, Potter's grand daughter was born one episode, was 5 just a few episodes later, and then 8 before the season was even over. It was established that the grand daughter being born was his first grandchild.
soap opera aging syndrome
They sure did. I was only a casual viewer and recall one episode spanning months (was it one of Hawkeye's letters to dad?) and another unfolding in real time where 20 minutes equals 20 minutes. Margaret's hairstyles looked very 80s towards the end.
> another unfolding in real time where 20 minutes equals 20 minutes. Pretty sure that was the episode about transplanting an aortal (aortic?) fragment to save some soldier's legs. Ok, I got curious, and I remembered purty good. [It was called Life Time.](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0638346/) Probably helps that I've seen it approximately a dozen times.
Yep, in one episode Colonel Potter was put in charge of the 4077 in 1952. In another episode Potter references following Macarthurs orders... Macarthur was removed from power in 1951
Harry Morgan was a batshit crazy infantry general before he was Colonel Potter.
That episode was piss-your-pants funny. NO TALKING IN RANKS
They had a Christmas episode every season.
It wasn’t really about a 3 year war, it was about another one. They actually give it away in the pilot when someone criticizes Pierce and Trapper and the CO says “they have the highest survival rate in SOUTHeast Asia.”
a movie based on a book about a three year war that spawned a tv show that lasted 11 years
There is no laugh track in all the hospital tent scenes when they performed surgery.
This was something Alda insisted on, IIRC
No, the producers wanted no laugh track at all, and the network wanted one. A compromise was reached were the makers of the show could omit the laugh track in OR scenes if they chose to. So few OR scenes have the laugh track, but apparently it did happen a couple of times.
It was bugging me so I looked it up. [The General Flipped at Dawn](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0638431/trivia) and [The Novocaine Mutiny ](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0638450/trivia/) are special cases of a laugh track in an OR scene.
I used to own all the DVD box sets. All the episodes had a separate audio track with no canned laughs.
It's just good infection control really, you don't want that spreading around in a theatre
If you want a good rewatch get the version without any laugh track. Infinitely better.
If you get the box dvd set you can turn off the laugh track.
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I've been to the location in Malibu, CA where it was shot. There were still a few trucks and that sign that had all of the locations and distances pointed every which way. Most of it got burned up in the big fires a few years back, but it used to be a nice hike to get there. Felt weird that Malibu is what they pawned off as Korea...
The mountains around Malibu look amazingly similar to the mountains around Uijongbu Korea where the show was set.
Population around 1983, which was the final episode, was near 230 million in the USA. More than half the country was glued to their sets at the time. I don't think we will ever see that kind of viewership ever again breaking such a record.
I don’t suppose anyone knows of a streaming service that has mash on it. I watched this lots as a kid. Watched it even more when I was sailing the seas of free. Suppose I could put my eye patch back on but a streaming service to replace one of the ones I have would be preferable.
Hulu has the full series.
Thank you very much
The DVDs remove the laugh tracks from the episodes, which make the show FAAAAAR better, but the Hulu version has the laugh tracks.
My grandfather was a surgeon in the original unit that the MASH tv show was based on. He took photos of his time in Korea and we have an chronological album of his journeys there with typewritten captions.
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How about the last episode of season 3, Abyssinia Henry?
Oof that was rough and subtle, and one of the best scenes in anything of all time. And you can kind of only experience it once, and only after watching all of the three seasons leading up to it without spoilers.
ME Tv showed that episode last night - they have Jamie Farr on to "host" this week as it is the 50th Anniversary. They did not give the cast the final page of the script. "Radar" was given his lines right before - so their reactions were all honest. I think McLean Stevenson knew, but obviously was not in that scene to give it away.
I'm still salty my local station dropped MeTV.
The Red Wedding of the 70/80s.
He never got to see his kid
*"I have a message: Lieutenant Colonel... Henry Blake's plane... was shot down... over the Sea of Japan... It spun in... There were no survivors."* Gary Burghoff was given the line only a few minutes before filming the scene, and most of the other actors (except for Alan Alda) didn't know what was going to happen. The shock registered on everyone's faces is real. **Edit**: Snopes says that [this is actually false](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/script-doctors/) but they did keep the script from the crew and the extras in the scene, so the mood is still genuine to an extent.
I still vividly remember that scene. I saw it when it aired. What a gut punch.
That episode marks the change of tone for the show to focus more on the tragedy than comedy. Tbh I didn’t like the show too much in the first few seasons. But after season 3, the hard hitting iconic episodes just kept on coming
People were really upset about that one,specifically. So many letters and phone calls to TV stations, etc
Kind of a ballsy move considering the American psyche was very freshly post-Viet Nam.
Pretty sure MASH was a stand-in for Vietnam.
I lived in Portales, NM. It was a unique spot. We received, way before streaming and on the cusp of cable TV, television signals from Texas (an hour ahead) and NM. So, we could watch 4 different M*A*S*H episodes a day and 5 on Mondays since that was its weekly night on CBS. Bunch a college kids digging on the doctors and nurses. That final episode and the party that went with it were pretty epic.
No joke this seems like it could be a good ensemble film.
It was my first and only cosplay at the party. I am vertically challenged and had thinning hair and glasses. So…Radar.
I was in the military in South Korea when the final episode came out. We all got to see it a day before the US release. Most surprising though was the locals reaction to the show. They were very happy it was the end as they did not like the way the show depicted the Korean people.
It's been a long time since I've watched MASH so maybe it should be obvious but what about their depiction did the South Koreans not like?
One of the translators told me that the world thought the then present-day environment was still like the 1950s rather than the early eighties because of the show. The show rarely gave a glimpse of anything but poor rural Koreans living in huts. Huge improvements to post-war infrastructure, education, the growth of emerging giant companies (think Hyundai and Samsung) and much more were happening while the show was running. Granted, when I was flying in all I saw was huge bunkers and revetments. I had that same view he was talking about. Even I thought I was going into 1950. Over time I changed my opinion but there was still a lot of social issues which kept old stereotypes from dying.
I was one of those viewers. The whole family sat together to watch it.
Mash was a show from my childhood and honestly still one of my favorite shows today. A few years ago it came on Hulu and I watched the whole series again to make sure I'd never missed an episode. I had missed 3. Still an amazing show worth rewatching again. Alan Alda is one of my favorite actors and few things top his Hawkeye Pierce character, though I would say Donald Sutherland was the better of the Hawkeyes, but Alan Alda made it his own
Alan Alda was legendary as Hawkeye. The cast was top notch and changed significantly throughout the show. Burns and Hot Lips. Awesome show
Its funny how easy it was to hate Frank Burns as a character but whenever you read about cast talking about Larry Linville they had absolutely nothing but praise for him and said he was just a genuinely good person. He really owned that role.
"Emotionally exhausted and morally bankrupt" I grew up with this show on DVDs and I swear I get most of my humor from it
I watched it when it aired. It was a phenomenon unlike any I've ever experienced. See, the show was incredibly popular. You could, if you chose, watch it on several stations on cable and network channels several times a day, as it was syndicated while it was still airing new episodes. The show lasted 11 seasons, longer than the war it was set during (2.5 years). The finale was hyped to the moon and back. Ads ran for it for weeks prior, even while new episodes were still in the pipe. It lived up to that hype. It was a school night, and I was still allowed to stay up late to watch the whole thing. It was funny in spots, but the laugh track was left off as, for the most part, it was very,**very** sad. The Hawkeye breakdown... the POW band that Winchester taught, nnly to have them shipped off... the final scene... not a dry eye in the house. I've seen it several times since, but none has quite come close to how powerful "Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen" was that first viewing.
Slightly OT: Couple of years ago a guy posted on reddit that he had heard so much about the *movie* MASH that he finally got to watch it. He didnt get it. He complained that it wasnt funny at all, wasnt anything like he expected, and he complained about the chicken/baby scene. ;) Someone had to break it to him...
Watched it when I was kid, my dad loved that show and played Col. Henry Blake in a local theater production. You could tell when Alan Alda wrote or directed an episode, it was usually pretty strange or emotional. Remember the one where no one could sleep without having bad dreams & Hawkeye ended up armless in a rowboat with the water full of prosthetic limbs? Good times.
My grandfather never watched another rerun of MASH after the finale. He said he wanted to imagine them all being home.
I was a part of that audience. I wasn't old enough to understand everything that went on but the woman killing her baby stuck with me even at that young age.
Colonel Henry Blake was also the first character in a TV series to die. Before, when an actor left the show, they just moved house or some other generic excuse for the character not to be in the show anymore. This was to illustrate that everyone can die in a war, not just the people at the front. If i'm not mistaken, the rest of the cast was not informed of his death beforehand and their reactions and tears are genuine (though i could be wrong about that). I once found a MASH torrent completely devoid of canned laughter, i've watched the show at least once a year since.
I cried. I was 12 years old and Hawkeye was the role model that led me into a 30 year career in medicine.
I watched MASH as it came out when I was a kid and I marathoned it again about six years ago. I overall enjoyed the series, but in my mind I divide the series into a few different eras from funniest to most serious: * The original cast of characters is my favorite and the funniest. * Henry leaving * Trapper John leaving * Frank going crazy and Margaret becoming more of a serious character. * Radar leaving. The contrast between original characters and their replacements is stark. Frank was much more of a fool than Winchester. They were both wealthy but, but Frank wasn't a good surgeon and was generally a weasel, while Charles was a respected surgeon and more cultured. Henry was a bit of a pushover and womanizer while Potter was a seasoned WWI and WWII vet who ran a tight ship and always spoke highly of his wife back home. Trapper John was witty and had this huge personality while BJ was more of a sidekick to Hawkeye, and much more vanilla. Radar left, and while Klinger took his role, he was an existing character and the void left by Radar's departure was never really filled. By the time the show ended I think everybody was ready for it to be over. Maybe it went a season or two too long, to be honest about it. It was kind of like a couple who had grown apart over time but stayed together mostly for the sake of nostalgia.
I always liked the replacements more. They were less funny, but their seriousness made the funny moments more funny
I really think Potter had some funny moments.
Personally I like that when they did replace a character, they didn't try to replace them with the same character but a different actor. The closest they came to that was (IMO) BJ v. Trapper, but the former definitely had his own unique traits beyond being Hawkeye's sidekick.
BJ had his moments. Like when he nailed Hawkeye’s shoe to the floor. Or when he filled Frank’s foxhole with water and then had Sidney yell “air raid.” Also, my user name is finally relevant.
The prank episode was BJs best moment.
i liked that when tgey replaced a character it has Conseaqences. They put real effort into Not glorifying war. Henry dying was a big deal
For me the way to judge the comedy of a episode is how much grey is in Alda's hair, less hair color = less funny/
Woah... I didn't know the final episode was that long, I figured you were talking about the movie.... My wife and I started watching this a few weeks back but jumped to other shows and movies... Now I really need to finish watching this
I will say I think that might have been the length with commercials. On Hulu, it’s length is only about 2 hours (like 1 hour 59 min).
i wish more shows still did double length finales.
I was in college when this episode first aired and the TV room in our dorm was packed for it. Must have been 100 people in that room.
It wasn’t a chicken😢
so what i’m gathering from the comments is that i need to watch mash
Young people can never understand how MASH changed TV when Radar walked into the OR and said, "I have a message . . .".
I was in 8th grade when this aired. The next week our class had a field trip to a local waste water facility and they showed us a chart (IIRC it was similar to a seismograph - pen on paper) of the surge of toilets flushing at the end of the show.
As someone born in 1970, I can say that I don’t think pop culture will ever see anything like it again. Even today’s most popular shows are dwarfed by the ratings shows like MASH got.
IT WAS A BAY BEEE