Life’s small irritations: it always annoys me that the TV show M*A*S*H, starring Alan Alda, is so much better known and more widely seen than Robert Altman’s original 1970 film MASH (with Donald Sutherland as Hawkeye, and without asterisks in the title). Altman’s movie is a classic, really brutal and anarchic in a way that the TV show could never be. And who could really prefer Alan Alda to Sutherland, or Larry Linville to Robert Duvall, or Loretta Swit to Sally Kellerman, or William Christopher to Rene Auberjonois, or Wayne Rogers to Elliot Gould? There shouldn’t be any competition.
The film was also a landmark in terms of technology and style. Altman, at this point, was experimenting with the use of radio mikes and multiple-channel mixing to get away from the need for a single microphone to record on-set sound. This change made it much more possible to record free-flowing, overlapping dialogue that approximated the rhythms of real speech. When taken to to the extremes that it is in MASH it can get kind of wearying to listen to, but it was an important development in allowing both sound design and acting to explore a more naturalistic style. In MASH it also contributes to the chaotic atmosphere, and helped MASH usurp the claim of Mike Nichols’ Catch-22 (released the same year) to be the definitive depiction of the madness of life in the military.
What prompted all this was reading the slightly tongue in cheek arguments put here and here by Jaime J. Weinman about how M*A*S*H wasn’t as good a TV show as Hogan’s Heroes. I won’t comment on Hogan’s Heroes, but it seems to me that the knee-jerk idea that M*A*S*H represented some high-watermark of the TV sitcom is an idea very much limited to one particular generation. Those over about thirty (or maybe forty) often cite it almost reflexively as being one of the great sitcoms, as if it is obvious and demands no more thought. (Ross Warneke, who writes in the Green Guide supplement of The Age, has done this fairly regularly over the years).
Unlike a lot of other shows regularly mentioned in this way (such as, say, All in the Family), M*A*S*H is regularly repeated on Australian TV. Because of my interest in the movie, I’ve dipped in and out of the TV show over the years. And it really sucks. It’s heavy-handed and not terribly funny, with one-note characters and a really intrusive, annoying laugh track. The often-praised complexity of tone, with “war-is-hell” messages mixed with the comedy, doesn’t strike me as much more sophisticated than the ham-fisted way 80s family sitcoms like Family Ties would shoe-horn moral lessons into each show.
What interests me is that I’ve never met anybody my age (I’m 29) or younger who likes it either. With most of these old sitcoms that have been endlessly replayed during our youth, you can find people with some liking or passing interest in them. Yet anecdotally, I think most people under about thirty react to M*A*S*H much the same way I do: they just can’t see what the fuss is about. Hopefully, over time, this emerging anti-M*A*S*H generation will see the TV show reevaluated. In the meantime, it’s a shame that the reputation of Altman’s much more interesting movie (which I think many of the more complacent of the TV show’s fans would find too confronting) suffers by association with such a dull show.