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© Copyright 2003, Jim Loy
The creator of M*A*S*H (I forget his name, he was the author of the book) was understandably upset as the TV series was slowly transformed into the image of Alan Alda. The idea of the whole series was that these doctors resorted to humor to anesthetize them from the horrors that they saw every day. In the movie and the book, this humor was mostly cruel, ugly humor. The movie was a shock, and it was a great movie. But I don't think that cruel humor could ever sustain a TV series. If we had to watch that week after week, we would have tired of it after only a few episodes. It really did have to be softened, in order to continue to entertain. After M*A*S*H became cute and cuddly, there were good (even great) episodes and bad episodes, great moments and bad (really bad) moments. And I think that some of it was at least as good as the original movie.
My favorite M*A*S*H episode was Charles and the concert pianist; the ending was very good. I don't know the name of the episode. There were many other great episodes.
Above, I said that cruel humor cannot sustain a TV series. How about Married with Children? OK, that may invalidate my argument to some extent. But, I was talking about a real TV series, not crass stupidity, which has a huge audience, I must admit.