Today, I like Alan Alda. Back in the 1970s and early-to-mid 1980s, I thought of him as a preachy liberal. He almost ruined MASH with his liberal plot lines and preaching. But he stopped with the preaching and every time that I’ve seen him recently, he just seems like a nice guy.
He does his best work when he's playing a villain. M*A*S*H missed a huge opportunity by not letting it's characters develop in a way they normally would have in war. They kept them too one dimensional. I remember a scene where BJ goes out into the field and has to leave a patient behind to keep the op on track. Back at camp Hawkeye gives him the liberal line and BJ tells him to shove it because BJ was thinking like a soldier now. The show need a lot more of that, but it stayed cookie cutter. Maybe the 70s wasn't ready for that kind of character development on TV?