This guy was only in a couple of episodes but was hilarious.
"He's the camp self-abusement director".
Posted on 02/28/2008 1:23:20 PM PST by Borges
What was I doing the night of Feb. 28, 1983?
Maybe spinning the new Prince record 1999. Sewing in bigger shoulder pads. Or drooling over those ultramodern VCR recorders. I might even have been watching a TV promo for a new show called The A-Team during NBC’s Monday Night Movie.
Whatever kept me occupied, I wasn’t doing what folks in more than three-quarters of American homes with TV were doing that night.
Watching the finale of CBS’ hit sitcom M*A*S*H.
Twenty-five years later, the series’ 2 ½-hour wrap up episode “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen” remains the No. 1-ranked network telecast of all time in Nielsen’s household ratings. It attracted a whopping 77 percent share of that night’s viewers, more than 50 million people.
Compare that to the end of Friends. While its 2004 finale drew nearly 53 million viewers, two decades of growth in the number of TV households actually left it with a much lower share of the audience: just 46 percent.
In other words, the M*A*S*H finale was a Big-Time Tube Event of the type that, despite those shrieking “must-see!” promos, just doesn’t happen anymore.
It’s not hard to see why. When the M*A*S*H finale aired, most American homes had access to only three broadcast networks. Cable TV was in its infancy, limited to maybe two dozen channels such as CNN, ESPN, USA, TBS, HBO and MTV, with hardly any original entertainment shows. Such current biggies as Discovery, Comedy Central, FX, AMC and TNT didn’t exist.
Practically all viewing went to the big three networks—Fox wouldn’t launch until 1987—with only negligible competition from early VCRs, primitive video games and the occasional unwieldy home computer. TV sets still were pricey, too, so families watched together. Friends and office colleagues savored the same shows.
And they’d all been watching M*A*S*H for more than a decade since the Korean War medical unit’s wacky antics and pointed drama debuted in 1972. The show spent its second season in CBS’ legendary Saturday night lineup with All in the Family, Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart and Carol Burnett and later helped establish CBS’ Monday comedy block alongside Newhart. By 1976, M*A*S*H had settled permanently into Nielsen’s top 10.
But a half-dozen years later, even centerpiece star Alan Alda was ready to bow out. He’d held down the fort after the departures of original co-stars McLean Stevenson, Wayne Rogers, Larry Linville and even Gary ("Radar") Burghoff. Alda had increasingly taken on writing and directing chores, in addition to playing Hawkeye Pierce.
He did all that for the series’ finale, which ran an unprecedented 2 ½ hours by itself, not including the sort of tribute shows that stretched the ends of Cheers and Seinfeld to evening-long marathons. Alda was among the eight writers of the final script, and he directed the epic in which he also played the dominant role.
Probably this workload was not the best idea. But then neither was making the finale five times longer than the usual episode. When I finally pulled out my M*A*S*H DVDs and watched the finale for the first time this week, I wasn’t exactly blown away. The pace felt sluggish. The plethora of writers showed, in varied scenes that seemed to represent completely different intentions.
Alda’s Hawkeye spent most of the show sullen and combative in a psychiatric hospital isolated from his compatriots. And this was a guy who lived for riffing off his Army antagonists and the war he hated. I get that it finally got to him. But the finale wasn’t the place for him to melt down. Our final taste of Hawkeye is pretty sour.
Ditto his entire-series colleague Loretta Swit as Margaret Houlihan, who gets into a shrill snit with David Ogden Stiers’ stuffy Winchester as the war winds down. The Klinger-marries-Soon-Lee arc is interesting, but much of the show feels artificially engineered to provide each character a subplot in the spotlight. The finale is certainly dramatic—it didn’t use a laugh track as usual—but it isn’t quite the M*A*S*H we’d come to know and love.
Top-ranked network series telecasts of all time: 1. M*A*S*H finale (Feb. 28, 1983)—77 audience share, 50 million viewers. 2. Dallas “Who Shot J.R.” answered (Nov. 21, 1980)—76 share, 42 million. 3. Roots Part 8 (Jan. 30, 1977)—71 share, 36 million.
Combined three-network audience share (ABC/CBS/NBC): 1983: 81 percent of viewing public 2007: 32 percent of viewing public
Top-ranked network series, by household ratings: 1983: 60 Minutes—25.5 rating (live viewing only) 2007: American Idol—17.3 rating (includes live and same-day time-shifted viewing) (Note: In 1983, a total of 28 series exceeded a 17.3 season rating.)
Number of homes with TV: 1983: 83 million 2007: 111 million
Cable penetration in U.S. homes (does not include satellite TV): 1983: 37 percent 2007: 58 percent
VCR/DVD penetration in U.S. homes: 1984: 12 percent 2007: 85 percent (SOURCE: Nielsen Media Research)
Wow. Doesn’t seem possible it could be 25 years!
I watched it with my parents, both gone now, and some friends who are still friends.
Many favorite episodes come to mind, but one in particular was the show where Burns decides to auction off the camp garbage. Hawkeye buys the garbage and has a helicopter drop it on a particularily obnoxious Colonel who happens to be in camp. LOL.
I remember watching it alone, in my very first apartment at college—wow. 25 years? I used to rush home after school every day to watch reruns of the show—my friends and I memorized so many lines much like we did the Carol Burnett show and Star Trek (the original series)...at that time I didn’t know what liberalism and conservatism were, I just really enjoyed the mix between comedy and drama. Who can forget the practical joker turning out to be clean cut BJ (what does that stand for anyway?!) after he filled a hole with water and yelled into the Swamp,”AIR RAID!!!!” to see Frank Burns come running out screaming like a little girl and falling in that hole? :-)
I remember crying all through the finale, it was so sad to see the character of Hawkeye so broken, but like someone else said, I rewatched not long ago and it was kind of slow...still one of the best shows I’ve ever seen.
Colonel Flagg. Classic. ;-)
LOL, they actually spent an entire later episode on this. It stands for BJ's parents, Bea and Jay Hunnicutt. Bea-Jay. :)
It’s interesting that the three most watched shows of all time fall into a late 70s-early 80s time frame. Peak ownership of TVs just before the widespread use of home video and cable.
I liked the episode that was in black and white and was improvised the entire time with a reporter asking questions to various cast members.
I thought that, taken as a group, that show had very good actors top to bottom, which made it an excellent show. I am trying to think of other shows that had comparable talent?
We got our first VCR in 1983, after getting Cablevision the year before. Funny thing is we first used our VCR largely to record movies on HBO, or TV shows. The first videostore in my area was three towns away, and it opened in the second half of ‘84.
The episode I vivdly remember was when Colonel Blake was discharged and they found out that his plane was shot down on the way home. IIRC, the actors were not told of this until the day of filming or something and they al ad-libbed their reactions. I my have a faulty memory of that, though.
You are correct about what you just said about that episode where the plane went down with no survivors as T.V. Land just recently had a MASH Marathon on, which included discussions with cast and crew about extra info about “everything MASH”.
M*A*S*H jumped the shark when they got rid of Lt. Dish.
SO I checked the length of each Episode on the DVD and they are 25 minutes for a Half Hour Show.
NO wonder I can't stand to watch TV any more.
We recently had TIVOed the New American Gladiator series and we fast forwarded through the commercials and such and found there was just a bit over 19 minutes of actual show and the rest commercials.
Maybe that is why most new TV shows can't hold audiences, hell they have Twice the commercials in them that those older shows who set the records for audience viewing.
I watched it as a relatively new mother and will never forget the scene where the mother has to suffocate her crying baby so that the group on the bus will not be discovered. I wonder how many mothers in wartime have had to kill their babies to keep them from being found.
The Henry Blake years were the finest on TV IMO.
I never missed a show. Neither did my parents who were conservative and LOVED it!
Dittoes! The first four or so years of M*A*S*H are a high-water mark for television. Seldom have actors had wittier scripts to play with (Larry Gelbart, et. al.).
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.