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Some of its achievements can be measured in numbers. Since its debut Sept. 17, 1972, M*A*S*H has won 14 Emmys and 99 nominations. Its annual rating has climbed from 46th place to third this year (after 60 Minutes and Dallas). In the same time, the show increased the going rate for a 30-second commercial from $30,000 to about $200,000 for a regular episode and, for the feature-length finale, $450,000, topping the rate of last month's Super Bowl by $50,000, to become the most expensive half-minute in TV history. In syndication, M*A*S*H's earnings already exceed $200 million, and keep on growing. There is a price for success, and Fox should be happy to pay it: a reported $5 million or so a year to Alan Alda, who anchored the show as Captain Hawkeye Pierce and wrote and directed many of the most memorable episodes in a series whose writing was often of the highest, hippest quality.
No work of popular art can tap the money machine so deftly without touching a national pulse or nerve. M*A*S*H, a Viet Nam parable that hit the airwaves three months before the Christmas bombing of Hanoi, surely did so. Like the surgeons whose no-sweat heroism it celebrated, the series began by operating on the wounded American body politic with skill and daring good humor. For half an hour each week, hawk and dove could sit together in front of the TV set and agree: war is an existential hell to which some pretty fine people had been unfairly assigned; now they were doing their best to do good and get out. As the Viet Nam War staggered to a close and M*A*S*H generated the momentum any TV series needs to sustain its quality after the first few seasons, the show revealed itself as a gritty romance about the finest American instincts. Here were gruff pragmatism, technical ingenuity, grace under pressure, the saving perspective of wit. The men and women of 4077 MASH could be seen as us at our worst hour, finding the best part of ourselves.
A month after shooting their last scene, these men and women—the M*A*S*H actors, writers and producers—are emerging from an experience that for some of them amounted to an eleven-year blend of encounter therapy and bootcamp. "I'm totally exhausted and depressed," sighs Farr. Says Swit: "I feel as if I've never not done M*A*S*H." Ask them what the show was, what made it unique, and you get a jumble of answers and impressions. From Alda: "The audience made a pact with us. We could be as imaginative and exploratory as we wanted—black-and-white newsreel style for 'The Interview,' surrealist in 'Dreams,' shooting in actual time or covering a whole year in one episode—because they knew we would never be wanton with them." From Morgan, a veteran of eight TV series: "M*A*S*H was about helping people." From Stiers: "There was always laughter on the set. Maybe that reflected our sense of freedom and accomplishment." From Christopher, whose Father Mulcahy was the perpetual supporting player: "What was M*A*S*H about? It was about a chaplain in Korea."