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Before it became a television series, M*A*S*H had been a mildly successful novel (1968) by Richard Hooker and a surprise hit movie (1970) directed by Robert Altman and written by Ring Lardner Jr. Most of the TV show's major characters were sketched in by the movie, but the tone was '50s frat house, and the emphasis was on the safety-valve sexual high jinks that the heroes perpetrated on some of their uptight colleagues. These droll humiliations would have been too raunchy for TV and too alienating for audiences in search of a weekly identification figure. Enter Alan Alda, who was starring in films and TV movies without having hit it big and who was now ready for the right series. "In talking with Larry Gelbart and Gene Reynolds," Alda recalls, "I wanted to be sure that we weren't making an Abbott & Costello Go to Korea, using the war just as a straight line for the jokes. The war had to be a springboard for our best efforts, exploring the horror, not ignoring it." Everyone agreed that this would be, in Reynolds' words, "a different Hawkeye, more sensitive, compassionate and serious than in the film but, through Alan's lovely comic touch, an engaging man withal."
He proved to be something more than that. Like the hero of Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, this Hawkeye is an exemplar of the American democrat, the self-reliant nobleman of nature who trailblazes into a wilderness of the spirit and emerges stronger and wiser. Alda's modern pathfinder is also very much a man of the mid-20th century: liberally educated and not reluctant to parade it, perversely triumphant in a milieu he blithely declares himself unfit to inhabit, japing and shambling after women, with a quip and an invisible cigar, like a Wasp Groucho. In later episodes, Hawkeye occasionally looked as if he were campaigning for canonization. But he could still bend, and come near breaking, whether in realizing he had a serious drinking problem or in surrendering to the inexplicable but powerful erotic appeal of his long time nemesis, Hot Lips Houlihan.
Every sitcom must have its bad guys, even as every war finds its black-market profiteers, body-count fanatics and suspicious spooks. M*A*S*H had its fair and flaky share, led by Frank Burns, the camp martinet. As Linville notes, Burns had "a mind that's obviously stripped its gears, and yet here he is standing over other human beings with a knife in his hand." At first, locked in a dead end affair with Frank, Hot Lips was simply a stock shrew, an excellent nurse but a failure as a woman. She was also attracted despite herself to the antic Hawkeye and Trapper John, and Swit and the writers saw possibilities in that. "First she be came unhappy with Frank," Swit recalls. "She realized there had to be something more in life for her. Then she started to talk about how lonely her position of authority made her feel. She was married and divorced, and she softened and hardened and grew from that experience. In the episode 'Comrades in Arms,' where she and Hawkeye are stranded and make love, both characters changed: they could never be true archrivals again."