M*A*S*H

4. Mobility as Metaphor

By the end of its first season, when it had been shown opposite such long-running Sunday night programs as The Wonderful World of Disney (a.k.a. Disneyland, NBC, 1955–90) and The FBI (ABC, 1965–74), M*A*S*H ranked forty-sixth in the Nielsen ratings. Although not an immediate success, the CBS series dodged cancellation after its first dismal season and managed to become a hit from its second season onward , thanks primarily to a shuffling of the network’s schedule (it was moved to a powerhouse Saturday evening slot between All in the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show). Even after its third-season move to Tuesday nights, M*A*S*H continued to draw large audiences. Larry Gelbart left the production at the end of the fourth season (1975–76), after having written what is generally considered to be the best episode in the program’s history, “The Interview ” (a black-and-white mock documentary that I discuss in chapter 7). Gene Reynolds followed suit a year later, so as to devote time to Lou Grant (CBS, 1977–82), a spin-off of the MTM Productions flagship series The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Although he stayed on as a creative consultant throughout the remaining seasons of M*A*S*H, Reynolds was replaced C h a p t e r 4 Mobility as Metaphor 55 Chapter 4 by Burt Metcalfe, who took over as executive producer during this transitional period. Besides producing the series from the sixth season onward, Metcalfe also directed over twodozen episodes, three of which (“Bottle Fatigue,” “No Laughing Matter,” and “Picture This”) would be nominated for Emmy Awards. Although his contributions to the show have sometimes been ignored in favor of his more famous partners , Metcalfe was the only scriptwriter and producer to work throughout the entire run of the series.1 As its fifth season (1976–77) was drawing to a close, M*A*S*H was among the most watched American television shows, landing in the top ten Nielsen-rated programs each year thereafter until the very end.2 Throughout these later years, when CBS made one final scheduling adjustment (moving M*A*S*H from Tuesday to Monday nights at 9:00 p.m., beginning with the episode “The Smell of Music”), the series weathered writers’ strikes (during its ninth season) and key personnel changes behind the scenes. Still, the show’s core group of writers remained at the top of its form, building elaborate scaffolding for the rich linguistic tapestries that were being so effortlessly woven by Alda and the rest of the cast each week. However, the protagonists’ innuendo-sprinkled banter was also laced with sanctimonious, self-righteous platitudes about the senselessness of war. This, plus the show’s gradual abandonment of overtly antiauthoritarian themes, became the focus of critics who lamented its apparent drop in quality and its retreat to more conservative—or at least populist—sociopolitical territory. Indeed, in the season 11 episode “Bombshells,” a guiltridden B.J. utters a statement epitomizing the shift in tone and sentiment that distinguishes the show’s final two seasons from its first two. After enemy gunfire forces him to abandon an injured soldier in the field, B.J. returns to the Swamp in a disconsolate state and tells Hawkeye, “We sit around here in our Hawaiian shirts and red suspenders, thumbing our nose 56 Mobility as Metaphor at the army, drinking home-brewed gin and flaunting authority at every turn and feeling oh-so-superior to those military fools who kill each other and oh-so-self-righteous when we clean up after them. Well, good luck to you, pal. I hope you can keep it up.” By the time this episode aired on November 28, 1982, M*A*S*H had already witnessed a noticeable shift in producer Metcalfe’s priorities. While each of the show’s main characters had developed into a complex individual whose personal conflicts proved more timeless than those witnessed in the more topical sitcom All in the Family, one could not help but detect significant season-to-season changes, which in hindsight clearly reflect political, social, and institutional transformations in the United States. In one of the show’s many epistolary narratives, “Dear Sis” (from season 7), Father Mulcahy writes in closing to his sister Kathy, “You know, sis, it doesn’t matter whether you feel useful...