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.
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.
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 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.