Korean War – Sharing History

On February 28, 1983, over 106 million Americans gathered around their televisions to watch the series finale of the incredibly popular television show “M*A*S*H.” This episode remains the most-watched program (outside of the Super Bowl) of all time. The finale aired after 11 seasons of the show: a situational dramedy about a mobile army surgical hospital during the Korean War. “M*A*S*H” not only broke the mold of television sitcoms, but also, in the shadow of the Vietnam War, addressed antiwar sentiment in a groundbreaking way.

The “M*A*S*H” storyline, based on a movie by the same name that had been released several years prior, featured two surgeons, Captain Benjamin Pierce, played by Alan Alda, and Captain John McIntyre, played by Wayne Rogers. The two, while talented doctors, are consistently caught up in silly hijinks, flirting with the nurses (though today we’d consider much of their flirting harassment), and drinking away the horror of war. The two are supported by a bevy of colorful characters, including the uptight nurse, Major Margaret Houlihan and her side-kick, Major Frank Burns, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake, whose shocking death was one of the greatest television blindsides in history, the company clerk Corporal “Radar” O’Reilly, whose uncanny ability to anticipate needs earned him his nickname, and Corporal Max Klinger, who did anything he could think of to earn a medical discharge.

Though the characters were interesting and relatable, it was the commentary on war that captured the hearts and minds of the nation. At the time of the series’ first season in 1972, the U.S. was embroiled in the conflict of the Vietnam War. By this point, antiwar sentiment was high. As James Poniewozik of The New York Times wrote, “the covert operation ‘M*A*S*H*’ pulled off was to deliver a timely satire camouflaged as a period comedy.” The show looked like a sitcom and the laugh track could convince you that’s all it was, but “M*A*S*H’s” ability to lay sitcom lightness on a backdrop of dark, dark war. In doing so, according to Poniewozik, “even the sitcom-standard high jinks—dealing with the black market for medicine, inventing a fictional officer in order to donate his pay to an orphanage—were forms of protest.” CBS executives were unsure about this move. In fact, star Alan Alda remembers that after the season one episode “Sometimes You Hear the Bullet,” in which a friend of Hawkeye’s turns up on the operating table and dies, the network was convinced the show was ruined. Someone from the network said, “What is this, a situation tragedy?” But America loved the drama. And so, the show went on. For ten more years. And, as Alda observed, “the element that really sinks in with an audience is that, as frivolous as some of the stories are, underneath it is an awareness that real people lived through these experiences . . . the crazy behavior wasn’t just to be funny. It was a way of separating yourself for a moment from the nastiness.”

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Tag: Korean War

“MAS*H:” “A Timely Satire”