Why M*A*S*H was a Terrible Show!

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"objectively"

The reviewer was being too kind as though he expected to be assaulted in his home by some crazed MASH fan.

Frank Burns was already damaged goods by Season 3 reduced to confirmed straw man. Want to attack some social issue? Put Frank in the pro if racism and con if wanting to support patients and enlisted men for example.

Houlihan most improbably discovered her inner hippy and inner commie by Season 7.

Henry Blake was the most believable in terms of letting the inmates run the asylum but even Maclean Stevenson could see the concept running out of gas and took a chance on finding new fertile ground which unfortunately did not work out.

Colonel Potter. Was he regular army? Only when he wanted to bully Winchester or Burns. He treated Pierce like the illegitimate son that he felt extremely guilty about abandoning when Pierce was a baby.

Major Winchester. A hard core conservative socialite gone totally soft? He had to grow as a person but it was way overdone.

Corporal Klinger. Uncle Miltie and the antics of Laugh In were still in fashion when MASH debuted in 1972. I guess nobody got the memo in 1976 that men wearing girdles and stockings went out of vogue.

Radar. An interesting character in the movie and the first season of the series. Are not most people hardened as they endure warfare. I was waiting for him to start wearing his pajamas to the OR as that is how soft he became.

Hunnicutt. It only took around ten episodes for him to become Pierce's hand puppet. Other than a brief discussion about doing unethical surgery on a battlefield commander he readily fell in line with whatever nonsense Pierce cooked up.

Colonel Flagg. I rooted for him each time he appeared to drag one of the 4077 inner circle off to the stockade.

MASH lasted because it was the closest example of telling your boss or mother in law off which people ate with the spoon the size of a snow shovel.

I do love the show, but it does have some drawbacks, and to be fair, it started going downhill after Radar left. Much as I didn't mind Klinger becoming the Company Clerk, he wasn't as funny when he had to take on that role and gave up the Section 8 scheme. In fact, I'm amazed they never did an episode about him giving up women's clothing! People would have paid to watch that!

Anyway, I watched most of the show back in the mid-2000s on Hallmark Channel, and I have a few gripes:

- I really did not like the attempt they made to turn Margaret into a sympathetic character and a raging feminist all at once. This was due to a female writer being introduced to the writer's room, and of course she latched onto Margaret and changed her to try and make the audience like her more. I think it was easier to hate her and see her as a rank-climbing slut than a ground-breaking feminist that was to be pitied having to live in the 1950s.

- I was never a fan of how Hawkeye and BJ were flaming, gun-hating liberals. (Keep in mind that I liked them because they were funny guys and overall okay people, but still...) They acted like they were sooooo high and mighty on the moral chain because they didn't want to go fighting or fire any guns (though a few times the show made jokes about Hawkeye's aversion to guns). It's one thing to agree with them that war is not the answer to conflict, but sometimes you don't have a choice. They basically came off as whiny, overgrown teenagers that were mad because someone dragged them away from their play area. I mean, what were they doing before they got drafted? Doing surgery, drinking, and chasing women (or, at least Hawkeye was, BJ at least had a family and believed staying faithful, even if he wasn't perfect about it). Trapper's hypocrisy was easier to handle because he was honest about not being perfect or moral.

- The series got kinda depressing the later on in the show it got.

- Having all the actors be 10 years older than the people sent to Korea and still wearing 1970s hairstyles kinda breaks the suspension of belief that this takes place in the 1950s. It got particularly bad when Alan Alda started going gray, or Loretta Swit got a 70s haircut later in the series.