Get to Know a Lighter Version of the 4077th with M*A*S*H - Season 1
Written: May 24 '09
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Product Rating:
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Pros: fantastic characters, very funny, serious issues, Tuttle, The Longjohn Flap
Cons: no Potter, B. J. or Charles, a bit less serious than later seasons
The Bottom Line: Season one of M*A*S*H gets the show off to a great start.
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| bilbopooh's Full Review: |
I grew up on M*A*S*H. It's been one of my favorite TV shows for as long as I can remember. It used to be in reruns almost constantly, so I watched quite a bit of it, though I don't think it was until high school that I got to know the first wave of M*A*S*H characters, the folks who preceded a sort of changing of the guard midway through the series. I had some recollection of pesky Frank Burns (Larry Linville), who was always trying to lord his authority over pranksters Benjamin "Hawkeye" Pierce (Alan Alda) and B. J. Hunnicut (Mike Farrell), but then he stuck around two years longer than Henry Blake (McLean Stevenson), the colonel initially in charge of the 4077th, and John "Trapper" McIntyre (Wayne Rogers), Hawkeye's first partner in crime. These were certainly characters worth getting to know.
M*A*S*H, of course, is the long-running sit-com about a group of doctors and other personnel living and working at the 4077th M*A*S*H unit in Korea during the Korean War. M*A*S*H stands for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital; they must be prepared to pick up and leave at any time, so the accommodations aren't exactly cushy. As for the medical part, the wounded come in bursts, with the distant sound of an approaching helicopter the tip-off that it's time for another marathon session in the O.R. This particular group has a remarkably high success rate with its patients. Even so, there are some who don't make it, and being surrounded by young injured soldiers takes its toll on each of the doctors, particularly star surgeon Hawkeye. He also is the camp's head jokester, as he has discovered that laughter is the only thing that can stave off despair in situations like this.
It's pretty heavy stuff for a sit-com, serious enough that I have a hard time sticking this in the same genre with the likes of The Monkees and The Brady Bunch. Nonetheless, the show is funny, more consistently entertaining than just about any show I can think of, so the comedy label is not applied inappropriately, and in its first few seasons, the focus is definitely on the lighter side of life at the 4077th. That's not to say that the darkness doesn't intrude, but there's so much silly stuff happening early on that it almost reminds me of Hogan's Heroes.
That has a lot to do with the characters featured here but not in later seasons. Frank is a sniveling stick-in-the-mud whom nearly no one respects. He's whiny and petty, easily duped and not much of a doctor. In season one, he's firmly in league with Head Nurse Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan (Loretta Swit), the show's only really prominent female character; the only one who comes close is Kellye Yamato (Kellye Nakahara), a nurse who's in about half the episodes but rarely in the foreground. Frank is married, but he and Margaret have a torrid affair going on. They'd like to think it's clandestine, but everyone in camp knows about it. As the series progresses, Margaret becomes much more sympathetic, but in season one, she's a shrill tattletale and a self-righteous hypocrite. When she and Frank aren't busy making each other's nostrils flare, they're plotting ways to dispose of Hawkeye and Trapper, who get away with their shenanigans in part because they're a lot more likable than Frank and Margaret, but more importantly because as surgeons, they are indispensable.
It also helps that Hawkeye and Trapper pretty much have Colonel Blake in their pocket, thanks largely to their alliance with sweet but shrewd company clerk Walter "Radar" O'Reilly (Gary Burghoff). Blake is a skilled doctor and a heck of a nice guy, but he's fairly oblivious about the intricate workings of his camp, and Radar has a knack for tricking him into signing everything from requisitions forms to permissions for leave in Seoul, everyone's favorite (well, pretty much only) vacation destination. The bespectacled young man has a strange clairvoyant streak that allows him to predict exactly what the colonel is about to tell him, and this flusters Blake so much that it makes it even easier to pull the wool over his eyes.
Blake is as different from seasoned, efficient season-four replacement Sherman Potter (Harry Morgan) as Frank is from his eventual replacement, Charles Winchester (David Ogden Stiers), who is uppity and cosseted but also a brilliant doctor and ultimately a pretty good guy underneath all of his pretension. The Trapper-Hawkeye dynamic is extremely similar to the B. J.-Hawkeye dynamic, but while B. J. is pretty clean-cut and constantly thinking about his family back home, Trapper doesn't let the fact that he's married stop him from being as shameless a philanderer as Hawkeye. He's more sarcastic than B. J., and as Hawkeye's sidekick, he lives in his shadow much more than B. J. does.
A couple of years ago, my brother bought me the first two seasons of M*A*S*H for my birthday, so whenever I watch the show, I find myself thinking of him, especially when Hawkeye, with whom he shares a first name, is on screen - which is most of the time. This frisky, wise-cracking, incredibly dedicated doctor is one of only four main characters to last the run of the series, and from the beginning, the show tends to focus on him more than anyone else. Though it's an ensemble comedy, Hawkeye is the star.
The only other major players are Max Klinger (Jamie Farr), a corporal most notable for his persistent attempts to get out of the army by convincing his superiors he's insane, and Father Francis Mulcahy (William Christopher), a humble priest who really has his hands full as the camp's chaplain. Neither is given terribly much to do in the first season, but Klinger is more noticeable because he's always parading around in stylish women's clothing. Minor recurring characters this season include African-American doctor Oliver "Spearchucker" Jones (Timothy Brown), part of Hawkeye and Trapper's posse; Australian anesthesiologist "Ugly John" Black (John Orchard) and Korean houseboy Ho-Jon (Patrick Adiarte), who Hawkeye helps send to medical school at his alma mater.
While my favorite seasons of M*A*S*H are probably four through seven, I still love the early seasons, and the first one has many stand-out moments. For instance, there are episodes with notable guest stars. Leslie Nielsen turns up as reckless Colonel Buzz Brighton in The Ringbanger; his disregard for the safety of the troops under his command is such that Hawkeye and Trapper plot to put him out of commission. Ron Howard plays underage soldier Walter Wendell in Sometimes You Hear the Bullet, the most moving episode of the season, in which Hawkeye takes one death especially hard and receives the following solemn pep talk from Blake in an unusually sage moment: "Look, all I know is what they taught me at command school. There are certain rules about a war. And rule number one is young men die. And rule number two is, doctors can't change rule number one." Although I wasn't familiar with his name, I was tickled to recognize Alex Henteloff - who had a brief but very memorable role as the scientist Scotty and Bones visit in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home - in Dear Dad, Again, in which he plays a genius who takes on a number of careers without going through the proper certification process. This episode also includes one of the season's funniest and most cleverly shot scenes, in which Hawkeye walks across camp naked to try to prove to Trapper that no one will even notice.
Romance is always in the air at the 4077th, and two stand-out episodes revolve around unlikely pairings. In Edwina, Hawkeye is elected to go woo the lovable nurse of the title (Arlene Golonka), whose accident-prone nature has caused the men of the camp to avoid close contact with her. In Love Story, Hawkeye and Trapper help hook Radar up with an erudite new camp arrival; this is fun to watch, but what really got my attention here was the revelation that Radar had once been engaged. He's my favorite character, but I had no idea!
My two favorite episodes of the season both involve a ridiculous chain of events. In The Longjohn Flap, Hawkeye receives an extraordinarily warm set of long underwear from his father. The weather in camp is frigid, so this is a highly coveted prize, and before the episode is over, just about every major character has managed to get his or her hands on it. Watching the longjohns pass from person to person via every method from gambling to extortion is a hoot, as is Hawkeye's agonized reaction.
My other favorite is Tuttle, in which Hawkeye modestly gives credit for his charitable donation to an orphanage to a captain by the name of Tuttle. They say that no good deed goes unpunished, and Hawkeye learns this the hard way when news of this noble, nonexistent captain gets around and he, Trapper and Radar must scramble to maintain the illusion. By the time the episode ends with Hawkeye killing the captain off before the situation spirals completely out of control, everyone has grown thoroughly attached to him; indeed, both Frank and Blake are convinced that they had meaningful relationships with Tuttle. It's an audacious con, but in the end, everyone wins.
It's not vitally important to start from season one and work your way through the series in the proper order. But if you want the real scope of M*A*S*H as a show, you'll want to start off here. It isn't the best of the seasons, but it's a wonderful introduction to one of the finest television shows ever created.
Recommended:
Yes
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bilbopooh
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