My guts are not here for you to love

For people of my generation, at least in Australia, M*A*S*H holds a certain place in memory: it was the show we endured for a few minutes every afternoon before The Simpsons came on an hour before the news.

I was vaguely aware of the show’s particulars: namely, that it was about Korea but actually about Vietnam, and that its finale remained the highest-rated episode of scripted television—the highest-rated episode of anything outside of sports—in broadcast history. I suspect that Klinger was the first man I had ever seen in a dress, a fact only slightly more confronting, at the time, than the fact that Jamie Farr was the first person I had ever seen of Lebanese descent. (Mount Gambier was, in the early 1990s, still pretty blindingly white.)

Later, as I was getting into cinema, I watched the 1970 Altman movie and loved it. Altman’s version, for all its misogynistic flaws, remains a kind of masterpiece. It certainly set the template for his career: the inquisitive, constantly moving camera, the jarring mid-pan cuts, the overzealous use of the zoom, the overlayed-to-the-point-of-muddy audio. (He perfected the style the following year with McCabe & Mrs. Miller, which is near to as perfect a film as I know, and also a cornerstone entry in one of my favourite genres: the alt-Western.)

The lingering trauma of having The Simpsons withheld from me, and the genuine affection I held for Altman’s film, meant that the series never appealed itself to me. While it had been sneaking onto my radar (no pun intended) for a couple of years—not least during the pandemic, when Alan Alda hosted an episode of Clear and Vivid with his former co-stars, and then again in 2022, when the show celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with a slew of documentaries and think-pieces—I’m still not entirely sure what compelled me to watch it, in its entirety, this year. Usually, when I’m in a funk, I’ll rewatch Seinfeld or The West Wing.

M*A*S*H, it turns out, is better than either.

Of course, it’s really three shows masquerading as one, or rather one that is better thought of as three, or as having three distinct periods. (This is in contrast to Cheers, which is the same show played twice at different speeds, or Frasier, which is one show played, to its benefit, on a loop. I’ll be writing about these