With so many new series popping up on streaming services and DVD every day, it gets harder and harder to keep up with new shows, much less the all-time classics. With TV Club 10, we point you toward the 10 episodes that best represent a TV series, classic or modern. If you watch those 10, you’ll have a better idea of what that series was about, without having to watch the whole thing. These are not meant to be the 10 best episodes, but rather the 10 most representative episodes.
There was no real model for M*A*S*H when the sitcom debuted on CBS in 1972. There had been military comedies, like Gomer Pyle and The Phil Silvers Show, and there had been sitcoms that dealt with more serious, contemporary matters in a realistic way, like Room 222. But M*A*S*H was as different from those as Robert Altman’s hit 1970 film had been from every wacky comedy and Army movie that came before. The series’ mastermind Larry Gelbart had been a writer in the live TV era of the ’50s, and became a go-to gagman in Broadway and Hollywood during the ’60s. Gelbart’s producing partner Gene Reynolds had been a child star in the ’30s and ’40s, before becoming a respected television director in the ’60s, working on the likes of My Three Sons and Hogan’s Heroes. Like Altman, Gelbart and Reynolds had been around a while before they found the project that launched them into a higher showbiz echelon, and while Altman always claimed to resent the TV M*A*S*H—largely because he didn’t own the property and didn’t get rich off it—Gelbart and Reynolds presided over a show that was as unconventional, honest, and challenging as the movie. They just did it with more vaudeville-schooled savvy.
Set in the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War, M*A*S*H spent 11 seasons following a unit of doctors, nurses, and support staff as they staved off boredom during the slow stretches of the war and performed “meatball surgery” in marathon sessions when the casualties were heavy. As cast-members came and went, the show’s producers (which also changed over time) wrote their arrivals and departures into the show, creating the rare sitcom where characters could die, and the composition of the cast could evolve. But two pieces of M*A*S*H in particular were steady: Alan Alda, who played the wisecracking, anti-authoritarian Captain Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce, and Loretta Swit, who played the officious but deeply passionate Major Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan. During the run of the series, some joked that the Korean War itself lasted only a fraction of the time that M*A*S*H did, but the show wasn’t really about historical accuracy; it was about people making a new home far from where they’d rather be, and learning to live alongside each other, even if they were as different as Hawkeye and Hot Lips.
The style of M*A*S*H changed significantly between 1972 and 1983. The first season is a lot shaggier, more in line with Altman’s film; then in the mid-’70s, after Wayne Rogers’ Captain John “Trapper” McIntyre and McLean Stevenson’s Lt. Colonel Henry Blake were replaced by Mike Farrell’s Captain B.J. Hunnicut and Harry Morgan’s Colonel Sherman T. Potter, M*A*S*H became as dramatic as it was comedic, taking advantage of its popularity to push its audience toward a deeper consideration of the horrors of war. The show took another turn by the end of the decade, after Larry Linville’s Major Frank Burns was replaced by David Ogden Stiers’ Major Charles Emerson Winchester III. The later seasons of M*A*S*H contain some of the show’s most daringly experimental episodes, but also a lot of half-hours that combine ham-fisted social commentary with a punishing barrage of one-liners, making M*A*S*H more of a comedy writers’ construct than the vital, singular piece of American entertainment it had been at its best.
Still, there’s a lot of “best” to M*A*S*H, such that the 10 episodes highlighted below (and the 10 listed below that) barely scratch the surface of what the show has to offer. A bad M*A*S*H—and there are plenty of those, too—can be insufferable. A good M*A*S*H is sublime in a way that few sitcoms have even tried to be, before or since.
“Dear Dad” (season one, episode 12): According to Larry Gelbart, “Dear Dad” was inspired by his wife, who felt that Gelbart was wasting the setting of the show by sticking to one or two stories and a handful of characters per episode. So Gelbart and “Dear Dad” director Gene Reynolds conceived a different kind of Christmas episode for M*A*S*H, with Hawkeye writing a letter home and catching his father up on all the pre-holiday news from the camp. Some of the anecdotes are bizarre—like company clerk Corporal Walter “Radar” O’Reilly shipping a jeep back to his farm in Iowa, part by part—and some are more poignant, as when Hawkeye plays Santa for a group of Korean kids. M*A*S*H returned to the “letter home” storytelling well multiple times over the years, not just with Hawkeye but with Colonel Potter (“Dear Mildred”), B.J. (“Dear Peggy”), Radar (“Dear Ma”), an enemy spy (“Dear Comrade”), a visiting psychiatrist (“Dear Sigmund”) and more. The show also flipped the premise a few times with episodes like “Mail Call,” where the action is spread across multiple characters, inspired by news from home.
“The Army-Navy Game” (season one, episode 20): One of the first-season episodes closest in spirit to the movie M*A*S*H, “The Army-Navy Game” has the doctors dealing with an unexploded American bomb that’s landed in the compound at the same time that the entire chain of command of every branch of the military is glued to their radios, listening for football updates. The episode spoofs bureaucracy, and is fairly effective at suspense as well, as Hawkeye and Trapper try to defuse the device while Henry relays instructions.
“Abyssinia, Henry” (season three, episode 24): A top-to-bottom stunner of an episode, this third-season finale shows what happens when Henry Blake gets his discharge papers and has to wind down his business at the 4077th in preparation for the trip home. “Abyssinia, Henry” is full of practical details about packing up and leaving, and has some of M*A*S*H’s best scenes of drunken revelry. Then comes the gut-punch: In a scene that was added without the cast’s advance knowledge, Radar comes into the OR to tell the doctors and nurses that Henry’s plane back to the States was shot down. Gelbart directed this episode himself, and after Radar’s announcement, the camera pans slowly across the room, getting real reactions from the genuinely stunned actors. It’s a signature moment of both M*A*S*H and ’70s TV as a whole.