While the writers of M*A*S*H were banging their heads to come up with a consistent creative stream, life up and got stranger than fiction. After McLean Stevenson grew tired of the political power-play between the writers and the cast, he decided to leave and try his luck elsewhere.
He wasn’t so fortunate after M*A*S*H though and eventually passed away in 1996 due to a heart attack. Meanwhile, Roger Bowen, who appeared in M*A*S*H back in 1970, also died that same year of the same ailment. In an extra eerie coincidence, they both died within a day of each other.
Is there a Nurse in the House?
In a setting regularly filled with doctors and patients, expect the number of nurses to be plentiful. M*A*S*H installed many of them in various episodes, some with speaking parts, others stashed in the background, a backdrop of non-speaking roles. The presence of nurses made the show look real, but none of the nurses would stay long in unpromising roles.
Because the nurses never played vital roles, writers started to give them names from Ham operators and the military, from phonetic alphabets, like Nurse Charlie. Actress Kellye Nakahar was frequently credited for her role as Nurse Kellye. She was also Nurse Able. Since she stuck longer than most, she eventually even had a speaking part in Season 11.
Not Exactly Historically Accurate
The TV series was based on real events largely drawn during the Korean War, and it was made to look as authentic as possible. In many ways, it was successful at this, but a closer look around the set would gradually reveal a bric-a-brac of inconsistencies.
Like, say, why would an army officer be loafing around the base in a pair of sneakers? Of course, these were shot at an angle to hide the fact. Actors liked to wear sneakers because of their comfort. They didn’t wear real soldier boots because it would be too loud around the set which, by the way, had aluminum cans, a pinball machine in the officer’s club; and a whole host of things that weren’t actually available during the depicted period.
Happy Ending
With the TV series struggling badly after its first season, no-one would have thought it would reach as far as it did. Even Alan Alda hadn’t moved his family to Los Angeles, and for a valid reason. They were so close to being canceled by CBS that first year. Yet, during their final episode, which aired on February 28, 1983, they broke television records, reaching 106 million viewers. The previous record had been held by none other than the Super Bowl, showing just how absolutely incredible this feat truly was.
The finale was titled “Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen.” It ran for two and a half hours, making it the equivalent of five regular episodes, with Alan Alda multi-tasking from acting, directing, and steering its creative process.
...To Be Continued
The M*A*S*H series was arguably the best program in TV history. The decision to wrap it up was not easy, and the network tried to hold it off for as long as it could. When the time finally came for farewells, the public, along with the show’s cast and staff, was left with a sort of separation anxiety. They all knew there was still a demand for more, and started to pick up what they could out of shrapnel.
This resulted in three spin-offs: Trapper J, M.D. followed the life of the character after the military as Chief Surgeon at a hospital in San Francisco. There was a focus on Radar’s character in W*A*L*T*E*R, how his life had supposedly turned out in St. Louis. Lastly, AfterMASH, starring Harry Morgan, William Christopher, and Jamie Farr, ended up failing thanks to impossible competition from a newly released show you may have heard of: The A-Team.