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TV Hybridity: Genre Mixing and Narrative

Complexity in M*A*S*H
a a
David Scott Diffrient & Hye Seung Chung
a
Colorado State University
Published online: 09 Jul 2012.

To cite this article: David Scott Diffrient & Hye Seung Chung (2012) TV Hybridity: Genre Mixing
and Narrative Complexity in M*A*S*H , Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 29:4, 285-302, DOI:
10.1080/10509201003601142

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 Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 29: 285–302, 2012
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1050-9208 print / 1543-5326 online
DOI: 10.1080/10509201003601142

TV Hybridity: Genre Mixing and Narrative

Complexity in M∗ A∗ S∗ H

DAVID SCOTT DIFFRIENT and

HYE SEUNG CHUNG
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“Television stories may be formulaic, but the ways in which they are told can
vary considerably.”
– Sarah Kozloff, “Narrative Theory and Television” (59)
“A producerly text combines the televisual characteristics of a writerly text
with the easy accessibility of the readerly.”
– John Fiske, Television Culture (95)

Few television series have become such a well-established part of American popular cul-
ture as M∗ A∗ S∗ H (CBS, 1972–1983), a Korean War medical comedy-drama whose genre
hybridity and unconventional approaches to adult subject matter contributed to a shift not
only in societal attitudes toward the United States’ political and military adventures abroad,
but also in the public’s awareness of the medium’s narrative and thematic possibilities.
Produced by Larry Gelbart, Gene Reynolds, and Burt Metcalfe for Twentieth Century-Fox
Television, this CBS series was unprecedented in many ways and deserves scrutiny for its
creators’ willingness to tackle serious topics, such as warfare, sexism, racism, xenopho-
bia, homophobia, generational polarization, and alcoholism. That they consistently did so
over a period of eleven seasons while also making groundbreaking experiments in televi-
sual style and narrative structure (in such episodes as “Deluge” [4.22], “The Interview”
[4.23], “Point of View” [7.10], “Life Time” [8.11], and “Dreams” [8.22]) makes M∗ A∗ S∗ H
all the more impressive as a cultural production that expanded the boundaries of the
medium.
Of course, the show’s relevance has not been ignored by contemporary media schol-
ars, many of whom have focused on its links to both Richard Hornberger’s original novel

David Scott Diffrient is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Colorado State
University. His essays have appeared in such journals and edited collections as Cinema Journal, Film
& History, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, Journal of Film and Video, Journal of
Popular Film and Television, New Korean Cinema (NYU Press, 2005), and Reading Deadwood: A
Western to Swear By (I.B. Tauris, 2006). He recently published a critical study of M∗ A∗ S∗ H as part
of Wayne State University Press’ “TV Milestones” series (2008).
Hye Seung Chung is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Colorado State University.
She is the author of Hollywood Asian: Philip Ahn and the Politics of Cross-Ethnic Performance
(Temple University Press, 2006) as well as numerous articles on Korean cinema and Asian American
cultural identities. She is currently writing a book on the films of Kim Ki-duk for the University of
Illinois Press’s “Contemporary Film Directors” series.

285
 286 David Scott Diffrient and Hye Seung Chung

(MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors) and Robert Altman’s satiric 1970 film of
the same title.1 Media scholar David Marc calls M∗ A∗ S∗ H “one of TV’s most formally
and rhetorically daring series,” a (re)visionary sitcom that drove the genre “to the brink of
respectability as an art form” during the 1970s, when it and two other CBS programs –
James L. Brooks and Allan Burns’s The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–1977) and Norman
Lear’s All in the Family (1971–1979) – reached a “literate peak”).2 Despite this and similar
claims, the formal and stylistic strategies employed by the series’ writers and directors
over the course of its original broadcast run have not received as much attention as its
button-pushing subject matter. As a result, the show’s “social complexity” (to quote Marc)
has overshadowed its “narrative complexity” (to borrow Jason Mittell’s phrase), to the
point that few media scholars concerned with the latter stop long enough to posit M∗ A∗ S∗ H
as an important forerunner of such intricately plotted ensemble series as St. Elsewhere
(NBC, 1982–1988), Northern Exposure (CBS, 1990–1995), and The West Wing (NBC,
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1999–2006). But it is there—at the level of textual hermeneutics—where still-pressing

questions about television’s unique features as a narrating medium might illuminate the
ways in which today’s most “experimental” mainstream programs (from Arrested Develop-
ment [Fox, 2003–2006] to Family Guy [Fox, 1999-]) are in fact regulated, or kept in check,
by their reliance on signifying codes beholden to earlier productions. Such questions might
also bring to light heretofore overlooked connections between two volatile decades (the
1970s and the 2000s) often characterized by governmental corruption and political apathy
(or a retreat into the “personal”).
Rather than enter into some of the longstanding debates surrounding the contradictory
attitudes promulgated by M∗ A∗ S∗ H—a television series that mobilized both politically
correct and incorrect representations of racial and sexual minorities while engaging in a
satirical critique of artificially assigned gender roles that was simultaneously progressive
and regressive3—this exploratory essay provides an overview of some of the show’s most
pronounced (yet curiously overlooked) structural, stylistic, and thematic elements, from its
reliance on epistolary devices (handwritten letters, voiceover narration, etc.) and durational
extremes (major events and non-events, intense action and debilitating boredom) to its
unremitting focus on practical jokes, the playing of games, familial relationships, and sexual
dalliances. In addition to ruminating on how the program functions as a “producerly text” (to
borrow John Fiske’s terminology), one that “draws attention to its own textuality” without
succumbing to didactic messages about the supposedly corrosive force of television as a
consensus medium, we examine its unprecedented incorporation of thanatological motifs
and imagery within the generic space of the situation comedy.
Although today this may seem less revolutionary than it was in the 1970s (especially
since such “postmodern” sitcoms as Seinfeld [NBC, 1990–1998], Scrubs [NBC, 2001-],
and Arrested Development have brought death and even dismemberment front and cen-
ter within elaborately plotted, broadly comedic narratives), the corporeal, emotional, and
psychological traumas associated with warfare set M∗ A∗ S∗ H apart from these and other
television series, including classic and contemporary medical dramas like Dr. Kildare
(NBC, 1961–1966), Quincy, M.E. (NBC, 1976–1983), Chicago Hope (CBS, 1994–2000),
ER (NBC, 1994-), and Grey’s Anatomy (ABC, 2005-). This alone makes M∗ A∗ S∗ H the first
and only program of its kind: A secular-humanist “serio-sitcom” about the Korean War and
its effect on medical professionals and military personnel, not to mention the many civilians
whose lives are imperiled outside hospital walls, in the inhospitable terrain of what, for
many Americans, had been a distant and foreign land.4
M∗ A∗ S∗ H’s mish-mashing of extremes, its brazen mix of humor, humanism, and death-
peppered drama, was apparent from the outset of the show’s original run on CBS stations,
 TV Hybridity: Genre Mixing and Narrative Complexity in M∗ A∗ S∗ H 287

beginning with the September 17, 1972 broadcast of the pilot episode. Indeed, that first
episode’s opening sequence – showing quotidian moments within the 4077th Mobile Army
Surgical Hospital (MASH) – effectively sets the tone for M∗ A∗ S∗ H’s unique combination
of situation comedy and serious medical drama. Captain Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye”
Pierce (Alan Alda), “Trapper” John McIntyre (Wayne Rogers), and their cohorts drink,
fool around, play tricks on one another, and flirt excessively during their spare time; yet,
at the drop of a helmet, they can spring into action and dedicate themselves fully to
the incoming patients. As Richard Hornberger (a.k.a. Richard Hooker), a former MASH
doctor who worked at the 8055th during the Korean War, writes in the Foreword of his
1968 semi-autobiographical novel:

The surgeons in the MASH hospitals were exposed to extremes of hard work,
leisure, tension, boredom, heat, cold, satisfaction and frustration that most of
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them had never faced before. . .The various stresses. . .produced behavior in
many of them that. . .seemed inconsistent with their earlier, civilian behavior
patterns. A few flipped their lids, but most of them just raised hell, in a variety
of ways and degrees.5

Thanks to its episodic yet accumulative format, M∗ A∗ S∗ H could capture these extremes
in greater detail and variety than its literary and cinematic predecessors, in the process
transforming or modulating tonal patterns, storylines, personalities, and even climate con-
ditions episode-to-episode, season-to-season. It did so while sticking to the same group of
finely sketched, tightly bound (and tightly wound) characters, including the aforementioned
Hawkeye and Trapper as well as the latter’s replacement, B.J. Hunnicutt (Mike Farrell); the
4077’s ill-fated Commanding Officer Henry Blake (McLean Stevenson); his replacement
Colonel Sherman Potter (Harry Morgan); head nurse Major Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan
(Loretta Swit); diminutive company clerk Corporal “Radar” O’Reilly (Gary Burghoff);
camp nincompoop Major Frank Burns; his blueblood replacement Major Charles Emer-
son Winchester III (David Ogden Stiers); and cross-dressing, disorderly orderly Corporal
Max Klinger (Jamie Farr). Although we gesture toward the complex relationships among
these and other characters near the end of this essay, we wish to begin our exploration
by turning to particular episodes that illustrate the series’ sophisticated treatment of time
and space, both of which are deftly manipulated through parallel and intersecting plotlines,
perspectival shifts, flashbacks, voiceovers, and emphases on the durational, existential, and
phenomenological extremes of war.
Nearly every one of M∗ A∗ S∗ H’s 251 episodes oscillate between major events and non-
events, between the sudden appearance of helicopters filled with bleeding bodies and the
excruciatingly dull downtime in which “nothing happens.” As Yvonne Tasker states, “In
a context in which chaos reigns,” the Korean War is “presented as an absurd oscillation
between intense boredom and intensive slaughter.”6 Such a discombobulating condition is
linked to the actual experiences of soldiers, surgeons, nurses, and other military or medical
personnel during the war, and is indicative of this television series’ narrative elasticity – its
capacity to stretch and contract time in a realistic yet artificial manner.7 This is apparent
in such episodes as “Crisis” (2.21), “Post Op” (5.23), “The Light That Failed” (6.06),
“Out of Gas” (7.12), and “The Price of Tomato Juice” (4.15), which furthermore hinge
upon a dialectic in which the rationing of food and electricity and shortages of blood,
sodium pentothal, and other necessities cast in relief the profusion of wounded soldiers
being brought into the camp (not to mention unexpected shipments of unnecessary items,
like salt tablets and ice cream churn). These and other episodes furthermore tweak the
 288 David Scott Diffrient and Hye Seung Chung

organizational logic of the sitcom genre, in which major and minor events are typically
orchestrated according to a cyclical schema. In most traditional sitcom episodes, a state
of initial order (or equilibrium) is disrupted (or thrown into disequilibrium) prior to a
culminating return to normality or the status quo (the reinstatement of equilibrium by
episode’s end). While this is apparent in many M∗ A∗ S∗ H episodes, the “partial restoration
of order” that comes with each of the abovementioned episodes’ codas only intensifies the
characters’ ongoing (never satiated) need to change the current situation—to either escape
the winter weather of war-torn Korea or simply ensure that basic supplies (like light bulbs
and bandages) will be on hand during the next crisis.8
When supply lines are cut off, the relative lack of material comforts and medical
supplies only aggravates the already aggrieved state of the men and women who are torn
between events and non-events, the momentous and the meaningless, “full rich days” and
“the big empty” (to borrow the words of Henry Blake in “Crisis,” when he phones HQ about
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the lack of furniture in his office). A representative work in this light is the penultimate
episode of Season Four, “Deluge.” This episode, written by Simon Muntner and series
co-creator Larry Gelbart, gestures toward Hornberger’s novel, the ninth chapter of which
deals with the “busiest two weeks the Double Natural/4077 had ever known.”9 As the author
writes, “During periods of only sporadic employment they often drank far too much and
complained far too much, but with the coming of The Deluge they had become useful
people again, a fulfilled effective fighting unit and not just a bunch of semi-employed stew
bums stranded in the middle of nowhere.”10
While beholden to Hornberger’s text, the TV episode differs from it considerably,
fusing various textual and intertextual elements in a way that captures Jason Mittell’s notion
of generic “mixology”—a now-common feature in contemporary television programs.11
“Deluge” begins with a Fox Movietone newsreel in which images of factory work and
athletic training are quickly intercut with split-second shots of a bomber plane in midair
and a group of female water-skiers performing for the camera. Black-and-white archival
footage of Winston Churchill standing at a podium next to the Union Jack and speaking
before a crowd at Plymouth, England, is juxtaposed with shots of helicopters landing
at the MASH 4077. The British Prime Minister’s spoken tribute to, in his words, “the
handful of American soldiers” stationed in Korea (“three or four battalions at most”) and
pitted “against overwhelming odds” (over 300,000 Chinese pouring across the Yalu River,
as the camp’s loudspeaker reports later in the episode) is significant, for it anticipates
the disproportionate ratio of doctors to patients and thus sets the narrative template for
measuring the dialectical relationship between paucity and abundance in this episode.
In addition, the radical dissimilarity between split-second images in the first part of the
newsreel – bomber plane and water-skiers – foreshadows the tension between war and
leisure, battlefield and home front; suggesting that the medical personnel who are faced
with an influx of wounded G.I.s occupy a liminal space that is neither combat zone nor safe
haven (as the R&R destination Tokyo is).
The title (“Deluge”) is fitting, not only insofar as the number of wounded patients
being brought into the O.R. is like the torrential rain that pours outside (and trickles
through the leaking roof), but also because the TV viewing audience also encounters a
surplus of sorts, a narrative abundance that distinguishes this schizophrenic episode, which
continually oscillates between archival stock footage dating back to the early-1950s and
newly shot operating scenes of the understaffed unit and underequipped medical personnel
contending with one setback after another. Such juxtapositions, rendered as aesthetic and
stylistic breaks (from black-and-white to color cinematography, from direct address and
documentary footage to dramaturgical reenactment), furthermore underscore the ways
 TV Hybridity: Genre Mixing and Narrative Complexity in M∗ A∗ S∗ H 289

in which the American public was either largely oblivious or merely indifferent to the
day-to-day difficulties faced by the men and women in Korea. For example, incongruous
shots of dancers at the Harvest Moon Ballroom in New York are framed by a scene
of Hawkeye and Radar administering triage care outside the O.R., examining wounded
soldiers to the same nondiegetic musical accompaniment (first “The Tennessee Waltz,” then
“When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along”). Later, archival footage
of Dagwood, an eight-year-old cat playing ping-pong with a human partner (using its
paw rather than a paddle), accentuates the challenges involved in performing “barehanded
surgery,” something required of B.J. and Hawkeye after the camp runs out of gloves.
Other supply shortages (of plasma and sulfa), not to mention the dearth of medical
personnel (forcing members of the understaffed unit to occasionally “double in gas,” that
is, be temporary anesthesiologists), contrast the abundance of certain non-surgical items,
such as chicken beaks (the unsavory dinner served by Radar to Potter) and toilet paper (of
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which they have 5,000 rolls). In describing his “beak stew” as “surplus,” Potter sets the
stage for another excessive moment, when blood from a wounded patient’s chest sprays
into B.J.’s eyes. The copious amount of blood on the surgeon’s mask and gloves contrasts
the aforementioned lack of plasma, something emphasized through the insertion of another
black-and-white film clip, this time of Hollywood actor Joe E. Brown speaking directly
to the camera and encouraging viewers to donate blood. These are just a few of the many
ironically counterpoint images inserted into the episode, which shows newsreel recordings
of President Harry S. Truman’s whistle-stop tour of the United States (giving a “fatherly
talk” to students at the University of Wyoming), General MacArthur’s homecoming parade
in Manhattan, screen goddess Rita Hayworth speaking to reporters about her recent marriage
to Prince Aly Kahn, and a celebrity golf tournament in which Bob Hope, Danny Kaye, and
Milton Berle mug for the camera.
In a mere twenty-three minutes of screen-time, “Deluge” combines all of these seem-
ingly unrelated scenes into a fast-paced commentary about the adverse conditions weathered
by American military and medical personnel in a “limited war” that seemed to be of little
importance to a majority of civilians on the home front. As such, it and the series as a whole
exemplify John Fiske’s notion of a “producerly text.”12 That is, by drawing attention to
its own textuality while still engaging the viewer at the representational level (through its
characters’ witty dialogue and the impeccable comic timing of its ensemble cast), M∗ A∗ S∗ H
seems to be caught between the Barthesian categories of the “writerly” and the “readerly,”
producing not “a singular reading subject,” but “one that is involved in the process of
representation rather than a victim of it.” According to Fiske, a producerly text:

plays with the difference between the representation and the real. . .and it re-
places the pleasures of identification and familiarity with more cognitive plea-
sures of participation and production. But it does not do this in a so-called
“radical” way: it does not emphasize differences between itself and more fa-
miliar modes of representation, it does not address itself to a minority, alienated
group in society. Rather, it treats its readers as members of a semiotic democ-
racy, already equipped with the discursive competencies to make meanings and
motivated by pleasure to want to participate in the process.

As jarring as the sight of a tabby playing ping-pong with its paw may be, it and several
other images throughout this episode gesture toward some of the leisure activities that
Hawkeye and the rest of the gang engage in as a temporary release from their pent-up
frustrations. Indeed, an episode from Season Five, “Ping Pong” (5.16), foregrounds the
 290 David Scott Diffrient and Hye Seung Chung

pastime of table tennis as both a means of blowing off steam and a metaphor for the
Korean War, which swung back and forth, across the 38th Parallel, in favor of the North
and the South over a period of three years. “Deluge” features a similar fluctuation, one that
shuttles us from one aesthetic and/or ideological extreme to another while illustrating the
differences between the poverty of war-torn Korea and the prosperity of post-World War
II America.13 However, like a bottle of soda that has been shaken, the episode culminates
with an explosion: Seconds after a light bulb bursts above B.J.’s patient, a bomb detonates
outside the window of the O.R., sending broken glass into the room. The window shards
could be said to reflect the fractured narrative of this episode, which furthermore features
a scene in which Radar, having broken his eyeglasses, says that he can still see, albeit “just
a few times more than [he] used to.”
Like Radar, viewers of M∗ A∗ S∗ H may find their vision “multiplied” in this and other
episodes featuring alternating narrative tracks, divergent or dovetailing plotlines that suggest
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the phenomenological extremes experienced by MASH units during the war. A good
example of this is “Some 38th Parallels” (4.19), an episode that similarly revolves around
heavy casualties but which also ties together several subplots (including Hawkeye’s clash
with a war-mongering colonel, Burns’s attempt to charge Koreans for their use of refuse, and
Radar’s emotional attachment to a patient who later dies). Taken together, these quotidian
moments comprise an unconventional narrative rooted in observational humor, one that is,
to a large degree, non-linear, multi-focal, and built on intersecting storylines and/or thematic
parallels. Carl Freedman contends that M∗ A∗ S∗ H was “the first weekly show successfully
to mix comic with serious drama.” Moreover, as Freedman states, most episodes contain
three story lines, “and of these one tends to be tragic or (more often) pathetic; one tends to
be farcical; and the third is a wild card, usually humorous with some serious leavening.”14
Although Hawkeye is the heart and soul of M∗ A∗ S∗ H, the other principal charac-
ters contribute to the thematic parallelism and multiple storylines so typical of the series.
Many of them take center stage in several episodes, most notably such fifth-season en-
tries as “Lieutenant Radar O’Reilly” (5.04), “The Nurses” (5.05), “Mulcahy’s War” (5.08),
“The Colonel’s Horse” (5.11), and “Margaret’s Marriage” (5.24). Along with other 1970s
ensemble comedies like Barney Miller (ABC, 1975–1982) and Taxi (ABC, 1978–1982;
NBC, 1982–1983), M∗ A∗ S∗ H pioneered the use of proliferating and intersecting storylines,
which, according to Sarah Kozloff, are today commonly found in many “ongoing, scripted,
fictional television narratives.” In her study of televisual narrativity, Kozloff states that each
given storyline in a multiperspectival program like M∗ A∗ S∗ H “may be formulaic, but the
ways in which it combines with, parallels, contrasts, or comments upon another storyline
may add interest and complexity.”15 More importantly, “the strategy of proliferating sto-
rylines diffuses the viewer’s interest in any one line of action and spreads that interest
over a larger field,” thus displacing audience interest “from the syntagmatic axis to the
paradigmatic – that is, from the flow of events per se to the revelation and development
of existents.”16 What Kozloff refers to as “existents” are those taken-for-granted aspects of
narrativity, such as characters and setting, which take on new meanings depending on their
situational relationship to one another. Although, according to Kozloff, “television narra-
tives commonly underutilize setting,”17 the nondescript, hilly backdrop that is “Korea” is
paradoxically pushed from the periphery to the center as a conceptual locus around which
other themes (such as boredom, bravery, loneliness, and togetherness) congeal and from
which multiple storylines emerge.
Although the quotidian scenes in “Some 38th Parallels” appear to differ from the ex-
traordinary events taking place in “Deluge,” these episodes share certain narrative features,
specifically a willingness to depart from traditional genre conventions and show several
 TV Hybridity: Genre Mixing and Narrative Complexity in M∗ A∗ S∗ H 291

unrelated events transpiring in contingent or overlapping spaces. Moreover, since the au-
dience for the embedded Movietone News segments in “Deluge” is implied, there is a
suggestion that our own spectatorship stands in for that of contemporaneous viewers at
home and in Korea (where films are imported to entertain American troops, as highlighted
in such episodes as “Bulletin Board [3.16] and “House Arrest” [3.18]). This overlapping or
doubling might therefore remind us that vision is central to our understanding of M∗ A∗ S∗ H’s
themes. Hence the emphasis on eyesight, ocularcentricity, and perceptual limitations in such
episodes as “Out of Sight, Out of Mind” (5.03) and “Point of View.” Whereas the former
episode finds Hawkeye stepping into a blind patient’s shoes when he temporarily loses
his sight as a result of a stove explosion, the latter episode allows us to see things from a
wounded soldier’s perspective.
In “Out of Sight, Out of Mind,” Hawkeye (the “Eye of the Hawk,” as he is later referred
to in “Letters” [9.02]) initially wonders if he should keep his nickname, but eventually
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regains his vision after an ophthalmologist takes off his bandages. Less fortunate is Tom
Straw (Tom Sullivan), an English teacher from San Francisco who commiserates with the
sightless doctor, but unlike Hawkeye has been permanently blinded by a grenade explosion.
The temporary loss of eyesight awakens the doctor’s other senses, allowing him to hear
choppers in the distance (thereby momentarily inheriting Radar’s extrasensory perception)
and to get a whiff of bowel during B.J.’s operation on a patient whose intestine is perforated.
“One part of the world has closed down for me, but another part has opened up,” Hawkeye
tells his tent-mate, concluding, “I’ve never spent a more conscious day in my life.” Whereas
this episode remains upbeat, with Hawkeye cracking jokes about Claude Rains in The
Invisible Man (1933), pulling a fast one on Burns (who has been cheating on sports scores
transmitted via radio), and faking a relapse so as to catch a glimpse of scantily clad nurses,
the Season Seven episode “Point of View” is more solemn, offering us the rare opportunity
not only to see several of M∗ A∗ S∗ H’s secondary characters in close-ups and medium shots,
but also to indirectly experience the entire process of a soldier’s treatment at the 4077, from
his arrival until his departure (with a tracheostomy operation and a sponge-bath between).
Throughout much of the episode our invisible surrogate conveniently remains silent,
due to his throat injury (resulting from shrapnel in his neck). Nevertheless, audience
members are positioned to see the otherwise familiar surroundings of the MASH unit
in a completely different light, notably from a bedridden, wheelchair-bound, bottom-up
point of view. Even the letter that Private Rich begins writing to his mother and father
is not presented as a recital to the show’s main characters or in the standard voiceover
narration found in other epistolary episodes. Rather, we see the handwritten words on a
notepad, illustrating the importance of the temporarily mute soldier’s vision as a primary
means of communication in this particular episode. This casts in relief Tom Straw’s verbal
transmission of his letter to his wife in “Out of Sight, Out of Mind,” a message that goes
no further than the salutation, “Dear Marilyn.”
The ocular shift to a wounded soldier’s perspective in “Point of View” is just one of
the many stylistic techniques and narrative strategies employed by the series’ writers and
directors that invite the viewer into a space of perceived historical verisimilitude, yet which
paradoxically call attention to the artificial nature of its textual construction, complete with
distancing devices such as a ticking clock superimposed in the lower right-hand corner of the
screen in “Life Time.” Broadcast on November 26, 1979, this episode (written by Alan Alda
and the series’ medical consultant Walter D. Dishell) predated other “real time” experiments
in televisual form, such as 24 (Fox, 2001-) and Watching Ellie (NBC, 2002–2003), by two
decades. But what distinguishes this early instance of chronosynchronous storytelling from
subsequent attempts to represent seemingly “unplanned” events as they occur (as in “The
 292 David Scott Diffrient and Hye Seung Chung

Chinese Restaurant,” a famous episode of Seinfeld, and “The One Where No One’s Ready,”
a derivative episode of Friends [1994–2004]) is the doubly denotative notion of “liveness”
in M∗ A∗ S∗ H, a TV series about life and death that tapped into the televisual medium’s
capacity to broadcast “real” (historical verifiable) yet “fake” (or simulated) events in real
time.
As Sarah Kozloff states, “‘Liveness’ may be defined as the apparent congruence
between discourse-time and reception-time—that is, no time gap exists between the narra-
tive’s production and its consumption.” She goes on to state that, unlike film, television “is
both a recording medium (videotape) and a medium for simultaneous transmission.”18 The
uniquely televisual sense of immediacy that viewers experience when watching episodes
like “Life Time,” while undercut somewhat by an awareness that “liveness” is achieved by
means of broadcast technology and representational practices (the recording and editing of
scripted, rather than spontaneously conceived, episodes shot on film rather than videotape),
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takes on deeper meaning in the context of the show’s thematic emphasis on living—or,
more precisely, on staying alive—in the midst of unending chaos and widespread calamity.
The premise of “Life Time” is simple yet richly evocative. In it, a soldier named
George suffers from respiratory distress and has only twenty minutes before his wound – a
lacerated aorta – becomes fatal. Hawkeye and B.J. race against the clock to save his life,
ultimately taking an aortic graft from another eighteen-year-old soldier, Harold Sherwood,
who has just died from a head wound. In the minutes before this comatose casualty stops
breathing, B.J., who has already prepped him for the graft, is faced with a moral quandary.
This is something that Harold’s buddy, Roberts (Kevin Brophy), makes clear when he
accuses the doctor of treating his dying friend as a piece of meat. Even Father Mulcahy,
who later consoles Roberts over the death of Harold, says an unusual prayer, asking God,
“If you’re going to take him anyway, please take him quickly, so we can save the other boy.”
The entire episode is lent a sense of urgency by the audibly ticking clock, visible in the
frame and therefore serving as a constant reminder that the stakes remain high in this game
of life and death, that a cheerful diversion to pass the time (like poker, which Hawkeye,
B.J., Margaret, and Klinger play prior to George’s arrival) can quickly give way to a grim
situation in which there are no moral absolutes.
Another Season Eight episode written by Alda, “Dreams,” likewise anticipated the
kinds of narrative experiments associated with more recent, postmodern television se-
ries, in particular Twin Peaks (ABC, 1990–1991), Northern Exposure, and Six Feet Under
(HBO, 2001–2005), all of which frequently usher in darkly imaginative, “surreal” mo-
ments that blur the line between reality and fantasy. The bizarre dream imagery in this
particular M∗ A∗ S∗ H episode, though, while harkening back to the films of Ingmar Bergman
and Luis Buñuel, stands apart from anything ever shown on American TV, primarily be-
cause it is rooted in a nightmarish vision of war that would have been anathema during
the sanitized Eisenhower era, but which eventually could be expressed in the late-1960s,
when documentary reports about the atrocities in Vietnam began entering the public’s con-
sciousness. Indeed, so packed is “Dreams” with disturbing images (including Margaret’s
blood-splattered wedding dress, Father Mulcahy’s blood-splotched Bible, Hawkeye’s am-
putated arms, and an injured Korean girl standing ghost-like on the banks of a river) that
audiences may feel a bit like the chief surgeon as he floats alone down a limb-filled river
on a rowboat without an oar: at once overwhelmed and underprepared for what he is being
shown.
Like the persistent ticking of the clock in “Life Time,” the sound of a beating heart in
Margaret’s portion of “Dreams,” in which an outdoor bridal suite morphs into an orgiastic
display of ruptured bodies piled on a bed, is more than mere rhythmic accompaniment.
 TV Hybridity: Genre Mixing and Narrative Complexity in M∗ A∗ S∗ H 293

Rather, it suggests that there are existential questions at the heart of televisual episodicity,
which can, in a mere twenty-two minutes (not counting commercial advertisements, which
occasionally break the narrative “spell”), deliver us into unsettling and subjective spaces,
thus situating the audience in the internal world of the characters as they experience
psychological traumas and emotional breakdowns. Whether or not we derive something
meaningful from this mix of reality and fantasy, waking life and nightmare, is dependent
upon our willingness to forego generic expectations associated with both the situation
comedy and the medical drama – categories that are blended in much the same way that
traditionally masculine and feminine spaces (battlefield and bridal suite, horse stables and
society ball, etc.) bleed into one another throughout “Dreams.”
This in some ways anticipates the kind of ideological contradictions found in
1980s TV series such as Hill Street Blues (NBC, 1981–1987), Remington Steele (NBC,
1982–1987), Cagney and Lacey (CBS, 1982–1988), and Scarecrow and Mrs. King (CBS,
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1983–1987)—four programs singled out by John Fiske (in his book Television Cul-
ture) as exemplary instances of genre mixing. According to Fiske, “the genre mix was
also a gender mix,” and such programs—by combining soap opera and sitcom elements
with the iconography of cop shows—are signs of the integrationist leanings in Amer-
ican popular culture and public life during the 1980s (a time when “the rise of femi-
nism” was met by “the reassertion of masculine power”).19 As he states, “Reading the
progressive meanings of Hill Street Blues or Cagney and Lacey requires the reader to
distance them from their apparent genre of cop show, and to read them as a contradic-
tory mix of the masculine and the feminine, of the cop show and the soap opera, of
bourgeois realism and social realism.”20 The genre hybridity of M∗ A∗ S∗ H, which shut-
tles between active and passive registers while ushering war film iconography into the
spheres of both comedy and melodrama, simultaneously activates and undermines audience
expectations.
Such blending is furthermore indicative of the discombobulating state of being in Korea
during the war, where 32-hour shifts and sleep-deprivation might very well lead to the kinds
of extreme emotional states witnessed in this and other M∗ A∗ S∗ H episodes, such as “Hawk’s
Nightmare” (5.14), which finds the 4077’s chief surgeon “being attacked from the inside.”
That is, his recent dreams about childhood pal Dickie Barber (who, in Hawkeye’s mind,
“explodes into a million pieces”), not to mention his sleepwalking strolls through the camp,
are a result of the physical and psychological strain of having to operate on eighteen-year-
old “babies” day in, day out. During his “midnight strolls,” Hawkeye unwittingly reverts
to his own childhood, dreaming that he is back in Crabapple Cove. His only recourse is
to talk through the trauma of having witnessed his friends dying horrible deaths (albeit
in dreams), using visiting psychiatrist Sidney Freedman (Allan Arbus) as a sympathetic
sounding board. Freedman’s arrival in the camp toward the end of “Hawk’s Nightmare”
once again signals to the audience that voice and vision are united in complex ways, for
it is Sidney’s calm voice of reason that helps Hawkeye make sense of his hallucinatory
visions. Having already forged a strong, intersubjective and mutually beneficial relationship
between doctor and patient (with Hawkeye, “probably the sanest person [the psychiatrist
has] ever known,” now on the receiving end of care), the two men share a belief that, in
Sidney’s words, “the dream is peaceful, reality is the nightmare.”
The abovementioned episodes are just a few of the many experimental (detractors
would say “gimmicky”) moments in a series that lasted eight years longer than the actual
Korean War and brought forth unconventional approaches to storytelling in order to keep
things fresh for both the creative personnel behind the scenes and the audiences at home.
Ironically, one of the most gimmicky elements of M∗ A∗ S∗ H – its reliance on epistolary
 294 David Scott Diffrient and Hye Seung Chung

narratives and voiceovers in episodes such as “Dear Dad” (1.12), “Dear Mildred” (4.07),
“Dear Peggy” (4.10), “Dear Ma” (4.16), “Dear Sigmund” (5.07), and “Dear Sis” (7.14) – was
such an engrained, formulaic facet of the series over the years that it became increasingly
difficult for the writers and directors to surprise spectators who had grown accustomed to its
many contrivances. However, because these flashback-filled epistolary narratives allowed
different individuals “to tell the story from their own point of view, adding depth to the
character traits already familiar to the viewers,”21 they served specific functions in the
ensemble series at various transformative moments and thus deserve further scrutiny in the
following paragraphs.
“Mail call!” These words, spoken by Corporal Klinger in the opening scene of the
episode “Communication Breakdown” (10.06), are music to the ears of the men and women
in the 4077. Letters from loved ones are their connections to the home front, much needed
in times of stress, depression, or exhaustion. Besides letters, magazine and newspaper
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subscriptions as well as care packages sometimes arrive from the States, material metaphors
that play a crucial role in sustaining the imagined community of the nation and the emotional
bonds of physically separated families. The second installment in the “Mail Call” trilogy
of episodes, “Mail Call, Again” (4.14), is typically multiple and dispersed in its character
focalizations, shifting from Potter’s joy of reading that he will soon be a grandfather,
Margaret’s delight in receiving a negligee from Fredrick’s of Hollywood, Frank’s anxiety
upon learning that his wife Louise wants a divorce (after having found out about his affair
with Margaret), Hawkeye’s pleasure in sharing the local news from Crabapple Cove with
his recuperating patients (whom he reads to), and Radar’s wistfulness in watching his
Uncle Ed’s home movies (showing Aunt Emily, Uncle Bill, and his mother Edna – played
by a cross-dressing Gary Burghoff – enjoying a Sunday afternoon lunch outdoors). Such
discursivity and diversity attest to the range of emotional shadings found in this and several
other episodes, taking us from anger to happiness, from apprehension to nostalgia; although
one emotion in particular – homesickness – predominates, especially since these characters
are unable to either partake in family rituals at home or intervene in crisis situations that
demand their attention.
It is notable that Frank’s letters from home are delivered already opened in this and a
few other episodes. Not only is Radar frequently instructed to read Potter’s letters aloud to
the multi-tasking colonel, but he is also seen habitually snooping through other people’s
personal missives without permission. There are very few secrets in the 4077, privacy
is hardly maintained, and personal property is perpetually being made available to the
public. For example, the plot of “The Longjohn Flap” (1.19) concerns a cherished pair
of winter underwear that gets passed from one army tent to the next, only to end up on
the frostbitten body of its original owner, Captain Pierce. Hawkeye’s longjohns go on a
corporeal tour of duty in rondo fashion and lay bare the utilitarian benefits to be reaped in
the midst of contentious ownership. For what could be more useful during the long, cold
winters in war-torn Korea than a pair of thick underwear, the most personal and private of
belongings which signifies the friction as well as the intimacy of the 4077 unit—a motley
crew of surrogate sisters and brothers, substitute fathers and mothers. Unlike the tailcoat in
another hand-me-down narrative produced by Twentieth Century-Fox, Tales of Manhattan
(1942), an exterior sign of wealth that is, over the course of its short life, punctured
by a bullet, ripped at the seams, eaten by moths, and draped over a scarecrow, Hawkeye’s
durable longjohns reveal the underlying meaning of informal wear: the desire to simply stay
alive.
Similarly, the Winchester clan’s special delivery of a heavily insulated thermal coat to
Charles in “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” is coveted by the shivering surgeons with whom he
 TV Hybridity: Genre Mixing and Narrative Complexity in M∗ A∗ S∗ H 295

shares The Swamp and becomes a point of contention when he wears it in the O.R., which
is full of frostbite victims. In “Communication Breakdown,” Charles receives yet another
package – a week’s worth of the Boston Globe – which likewise becomes sought after by
everyone in the camp. Although Charles wishes to keep the newspapers to himself, they
eventually circulate once Father Mulcahy accidentally spots an issue in the Swamp. And for
all their moral uprightness, Hawkeye and B.J. are not above poking their noses into other
people’s private letters, so desperate are they for news from home. In “Mail Call Three”
(6.20), Hawkeye probes vicariously and voyeuristically into the long-distance love life of
his namesake, another Benjamin Pierce stationed in Korea who has several women pining
for him back home. Because the would-be girlfriends’ letters to the other Pierce have been
mistakenly delivered to Hawkeye, he takes advantage of this slipup by reading the private
contents therein, unethical conduct for which he later apologizes when the real addressee
arrives to collect them.
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Not all correspondence, however, is “platinum” (as Hawkeye describes the letters of
the other Captain Pierce). Indeed, throughout the eleven seasons of M∗ A∗ S∗ H, several mail-
centered episodes hinge upon bad news, ranging from break-ups and requests for divorce
to the hospitalization of loved ones. Besides focusing on Hawkeye’s voyeuristic pleasure in
reading someone else’s love letters, “Mail Call Three” explores the feelings of helplessness
experienced by Klinger, B.J., and Radar upon receiving messages from their families back
home. Klinger nearly goes AWOL after reading his wife Laverne’s letter, which expresses
her desire for a divorce. B.J. too gets a letter from his wife, Peggy, who thinks it funny that
she is being pursued by a flirtatious neighbor. Radar admits to being jealous after reading
about his mother’s new boyfriend. Each of these men seeks some sort of solace in the camp
that might alleviate their worries. Initially unable to convince his friends that the impending
divorce is real, Klinger drives to Kimpo airport, only to turn back at the end and declare
his loyalty to Potter and the rest of the camp, saying, “I may not have a family no more in
Toledo, but I sure got one here.” Radar too sees the 4077 as a surrogate family, and even
suggests that, should his mother not find happiness with her new boyfriend, she be hitched
to Hawkeye’s widowed father.
Hawkeye’s father, a lobster fisherman named Daniel Pierce, not only writes but also
receives numerous letters, sent by his son in moments of circumspect reflection. These
filial letters became staples of the series for a brief time, beginning with Season One’s
“Dear Dad,” a Christmas-themed episode complete with Father Mulcahy stringing popcorn
in the post-op tent to “give this cesspool a yuletide look,” Radar mailing an entire jeep
back home to Iowa, piece-by-piece (a gift for his mother), and Hawkeye in a Santa Claus
costume being dropped by helicopter into a frontline bunker to treat a wounded soldier.
This episode serves an important narrative purpose, reintroducing audiences to the show’s
main characters, only this time through Hawkeye’s subjective point-of-view.
The first of its two sequels, “Dear Dad. . .Again” (1.18), aired later that season, on
February 4, 1973 (one week after the tragic “Sometimes You Hear the Bullet” [1.17]). It
is notable for the way in which deviations from typical character behavior are expressed
(as when Frank gets drunk swilling his Swamp-mates’ gin) and for featuring a line of
dialogue that foreshadows Father Mulcahy’s eventual loss of hearing in the series’ final
episode (“Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen” [11.16]): Hawkeye muses, “It’s a wonder he
doesn’t go deaf from the sound of all of the commandments breaking around here.” Yet
this episode also has its share of anomalies, as when Hawkeye tells his Dad to “kiss Mom
and sis,” a detail about the doctor’s personal life that is incongruous with what we learn
in later episodes: that Hawkeye’s father is unmarried and that Hawkeye is an only child.
Nevertheless, a statement uttered by the surgeon—“What we are mainly is bored, bored
 296 David Scott Diffrient and Hye Seung Chung

right out of our skulls”—compliments a similar sentiment in the second “Dear Dad” sequel,
from Season Two.
Entitled “Dear Dad. . .Three” (2.09), this episode largely concerns a racist soldier’s
unwillingness to accept blood drawn from an African American donor; something stated
outright when Condon (Mills Watson), the bigot in question, says, “I wouldn’t want any
of that darkie stuff.” In a letter to his father, Hawkeye explains how he and Trapper taught
Condon a lesson, by dyeing his face with iodine and convincing the racist that he has been
given “black blood” while asleep. After being lectured on the story of Charles Drew, an
African American doctor who died after an auto accident when a segregated hospital refused
to treat him, Condon decides to reform. Thanking Hawkeye for giving him something to
think about, Condon apologizes to a black lieutenant named Ginger, whom he had been
rude to earlier. This socially progressive plot point, similar to that in the Korean War film
All the Young Men (1960) and furthermore reflected in another M∗ A∗ S∗ H episode (“Post
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Op” [5.23], which offers a subtle critique of racism in its representation of a black corporal
named Moody [Hilly Hicks] and the willingness of a Turkish brigade to donate desperately
needed blood), is interspersed with unrelated scenes of the doctors performing a delicate
operation (removing an unexploded grenade lodged inside a patient) and Blake watching
home movies of his kid’s birthday party (sent to him by his wife). Despite the eventfulness
of these highlighted incidents, Hawkeye tells his father that the camp’s “biggest enemy is
boredom.” “We don’t know what to do with ourselves,” he writes, further underscoring the
existential crises that he and the other medical personnel deal with on a daily basis, and
substantiating Yvonne Tasker’s claim that war is presented in M∗ A∗ S∗ H “as a sort of limbo
in which characters battle the combined forces of boredom and military mundanity, a tedium
punctuated by intense bouts of activity when the numbers of wounded suddenly increase.”22
These initial three “Dear Dad” episodes set the stage for several variations in later
seasons, with Potter writing a “Dear Mildred” letter sent to his wife in Missouri on the
occasion of their twenty-seventh wedding anniversary; Radar writing a “Dear Ma” letter
sent to Ottumwa, Iowa, where his widowed mother, Edna, has remained since the premature
death of his father; B.J. writing a “Dear Peggy” letter (“the only way [he] can keep his
sanity,” the doctor explains to his tent-mate); Father Mulcahy writing a “Dear Sis” letter
relaying his feelings of inadequacy in the days leading up to Christmas; and Klinger writing
a “Dear Uncle Abdul” letter sent to Toledo, Ohio, and filled with comical observations
about the camp’s attempt to create a theme song for the Korean War. Such experiments in
epistolary narration would prove to be inspirational to television writer and producer Aaron
Sorkin, who years later penned similar episodes for the short-lived Sports Night (ABC,
1998–2000) and the long-running West Wing.
One M∗ A∗ S∗ H episode, Season Nine’s “Letters,” even consolidates the multi-strand
approach to plotting that had been revolutionized and honed by the earlier, flashback-filled
epistolary narratives. In it, all of the major characters pen thoughtful responses to a handful
of questions about the unit’s war experiences sent by fourth-grade students from Hawkeye’s
hometown. Against a backdrop of persistent rain, Father Mulcahy writes a “Dear Stacy”
letter, explaining how he “saved” a perpetually inebriated canine in the camp through
Pavlovian tactics. Klinger writes a “Dear Freddy” letter in which he recounts his failed
get-rich-quick scheme involving an all-male chinchilla-breeding farm. Margaret’s written
response, which begins “Dear Jimmy,” tells how her life has been affected by certain
patients whom she will never forget; including Mike, a soldier with a severed spinal cord
whose final hours before death were spent in her company.
Other responses in “Letters” include B.J.’s “Dear Louis,” Potter’s “Dear Danny,”
Winchester’s “Dear Virginia,” and Hawkeye’s “Dear Ronnie,” the latter the most difficult
 TV Hybridity: Genre Mixing and Narrative Complexity in M∗ A∗ S∗ H 297

to write, owing to the fact that its addressee’s brother had been treated by a MASH doctor
in Korea only to be sent back to front where he died. Ronnie Hawkins’s angry missive,
capped with the message “I hate you all,” hits a nerve with Hawkeye, who tries to pass the
responsibility off to Father Mulcahy before finally responding in his own inimitable way,
saying (in voiceover), “It’s not a good idea to take the love that you had for your brother
and turn it into hate. Hate makes war, and war is what killed him. . ..I’m sorry I don’t have
an answer for you Ronnie, except to suggest that you look for good wherever you can find
it.” Notably, these words come after the surgeon has successfully saved a Korean child
suffering from a subdural hematoma and are accompanied by a break in the bad weather.
But, as Yvonne Tasker argues, the letter that Hawkeye has had to grapple with “poses a
question that the series cannot effectively answer since its comic, and indeed its dramatic
rationale lies in the continuation of war and of the suspension of its characters in limbo.
The repetitive format of the sitcom is distinct from the sort of narrative arcs culminating in
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tragedy or loss that we associate with tragic or melodramatic modes.”23

Besides the show’s major characters, other secondary or minor characters became
the authors of unusual correspondences at various junctures in M∗ A∗ S∗ H, including a
North Korean spy who masquerades as Winchester’s houseboy and shares observations
of American cultural traditions in letters to his fellow communists in “Dear Comrade”
(7.11). Written and directed by Alan Alda, the Emmy-award-winning “Dear Sigmund”
is another idiosyncratic entry in the series’ ongoing experiments with epistolary motifs.
In place of the usual letter-writers in the 4077 (Hawkeye, B.J, Radar, Potter, and Father
Mulcahy), an outsider – compassionate psychiatrist Sidney Freedman – assumes control
over the episode’s voiceover narration. The addressee of his letter is also exceptional, if not
altogether unexpected (given the telltale title). Instead of a father (for Hawkeye), a mother
(for Radar), a wife (for B.J. and Potter), a sister (for Mulcahy) or an uncle (for Klinger), an
altogether different person – Sigmund Freud – is the one to whom Dr. Freedman has chosen
to write a letter. Given the fact that the father of psychoanalysis died in 1939, eleven years
prior to the outbreak of the Korean War, viewers are likely to side with B.J. when he asks
Sidney, “Don’t you think writing a letter to Sigmund Freud is a little crazy?” The shrink
disagrees, “Who better than he would understand?”
In a way, the entire episode constitutes a long-distance, posthumous therapy session
between Major Freedman and Dr. Freud, wherever the disembodied historical figure may
be. Undergoing a psychological trauma of his own in the wake of a patient’s suicide, Sidney
decides to take a “little vacation” and extends his one night of poker playing at the 4077
into a fortnight of rest-and-recuperation. In response to Hawkeye’s suggestion that there
are better vacation spots in the world (including the Swiss Alps and Biarritz), Sidney says
that “there is something special” about the camp, which he describes in his letter to Freud
as a place where “the inmates have an interesting defense against the carnage: insanity
in the service of health.” Partaking in a kind of “writing cure,” the depressed psychiatrist
shares his observations of the medical staff’s often abnormal behavior with his imaginary
addressee and, by extension, viewers of this episode who – seated before the television –
might be said to occupy the therapist position, diagnosing the relative sanity of Hawkeye,
Klinger, Margaret, and the rest of the bunch. With Sidney’s intermittent narration serving
as the sole connective tissue binding together the episode’s fragmented slices of life, we are
invited to mobilize an objective, investigative, pseudo-scientific or medical gaze, directed
toward familiar characters who, as in the aforementioned “Life Time,” are seen in a different
light.
Described by Freedman as someone who represents “anger turned sideways,” Hawkeye
is seen making his usual rounds in post-op, only this time wearing a tuxedo, safari hat,
 298 David Scott Diffrient and Hye Seung Chung

rubber flippers, and Harold Lloyd eyeglasses. Klinger fakes a head injury and speaks
frantically in Arabic to an unsympathetic Colonel Potter, who is busy cleaning his horse.
Sharing a nightcap with the camp’s guest, Margaret displays admirable discipline and
strength one moment, only to fly into rage and hysteria the next over the sight of an athletic
supporter belonging to those “repulsive, drunken, lecherous, evil cretins,” Hawkeye and
B.J. Radar, who innocently flies a kite with Korean orphans during the day, later carries out
his administrative duties by sunset, right down to writing a thoughtful letter to the parents of
a dead ambulance driver (in place of Potter, who instructs him not to change a word). This
embedding of a letter within the main letter similarly occurs in “Dear Uncle Abdul” (8.12),
wherein Hawkeye receives a missive from his dad containing what he believes to be “the
world’s funniest joke,” and in Radar’s own epistolary narrative, “Dear Ma,” which features
a reference to Klinger’s proposal letter to the happily married General Ridgway and a draft
of his soon-to-be-mailed dispatch to President Eisenhower, which the cross-dresser reads
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aloud to Radar and Hawkeye.

One person in “Dear Sigmund” remains an enigma to Freedman: B.J. Hunnicutt, who
never loses his cool in the midst of practical jokes and the chaos of war. However, the
perceptive psychiatrist speculates that “there must be a volcano under there somewhere,”
a foresight proven correct in a subsequent episode, “Hanky Panky” (5.18), in which the
calm family man unintentionally plunges into a one-night affair with a distraught nurse
who has received a “Dear Jane” letter from her husband in the States. “Dear Sigmund”
ends with an image of Colonel Potter in the O.R. diligently working on an off-screen
patient, accompanied by Major Freedman’s voiceover, which muses, “They look every
day into the face of death. On the surface they may seem like other doctors and nurses,
but underneath. . .ah, Sigmund, underneath.” The camera tilts down to expose the colonel
scratching his bare feet in a basin of hot water. The shot visually expresses Sidney’s
metaphor while harkening back to Margaret’s earlier dialogue: “I have three nurses down
with dysentery. I have a shortage of sulfa, surgical gowns, and rubber gloves. And I got a
call from my fiancé in Tokyo this morning who celebrated his birthday without me. Am
I upset? Am I distressed? No. One has to be strong.” The episode ultimately pays tribute
to the fortitude and perseverance of dedicated doctors and nurses who, during the Korean
War, survived extreme temperatures, habitual scarcity of supplies, and wretched sanitary
conditions.
The recurring presence of Freedman over the course of the series (beginning with
the episode “Deal Me Out” [2.13], running through “War of Nerves” [6.04], and culmi-
nating with the series finale, “Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen”) suggests that psychiatric
intervention is as crucial to the mental health and general morale of the camp’s personnel
as are the various games and practical jokes they play. Indeed, only by talking to Sidney
or some other sympathetic listener (as in “Mad Dogs and Servicemen” [3.13], in which
Hawkeye fills in for the psychiatrist) are the men and women able to cope with the personal
problems sparked by the arrival of letters bearing bad news. In Sidney’s absence, two other
characters—Hawkeye and Father Mulcahy—often fill the role of mental therapist by proxy,
as in the aforementioned “Mail Call Three,” when Hawkeye tells Radar (who is upset about
not knowing the man who is planning to marry his mother), “Let’s talk about it.” This comes
after Mulcahy has told Klinger (likewise upset about recent news sent by mail) to “sleep on
it, we’ll talk in the morning.” At the 4077, conversation flows as freely as the booze, and
each serves a curative role, albeit with very different effects. Ultimately, the “talking cure”
provided by Dr. Freedman, who not only helps soldiers cope with post-traumatic stress dis-
order and battle fatigue (or what in previous wars would have been called “shell shock”),
but also, in “Quo Vadis, Captain Chandler” (4.09), comforts a self-deluded combatant with
 TV Hybridity: Genre Mixing and Narrative Complexity in M∗ A∗ S∗ H 299

a “Messiah complex” (believing that he is Jesus Christ), places this outsider firmly inside
the fraternal order of the 4077’s physical healers.
As suggested earlier, the frequent use of epistolary narratives, in which the men
and women of the 4077 write correspondences to their loved ones back in the States,
stresses the importance of communication, family, and personal reflection throughout the
series. Significantly, these epistolary narratives, which are also highlighted in the trilogy
of “Mail Call” episodes from the first three seasons as well as the handful of audiotape
variations in episodes from later seasons (such as “The Winchester Tapes” [6.05] and “A
Full Rich Day” [3.12], the latter giving Hawkeye an opportunity to send his dad a voice
recording), furthermore reflect the extradiegetic compulsion of many fans to literally voice
their often conflicted opinions about the TV series, sending letters of anger or support to its
creators, who at various junctures were responsible for such “unpardonable” acts as killing
off Lieutenant Colonel Blake in the Season Three finale “Abyssinia, Henry” [3.24] and
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allowing Hawkeye and Margaret to have sex with one another in the Season Six two-parter
“Comrades in Arms” [6.12 and 6.13].
These and many other episodes, which are additionally saddled with the kind of
canned laughter that only further severs their connection to “reality,” serve as unique yet
representative case studies for examining M∗ A∗ S∗ H’s similarities to and differences from
other network ensemble programs of the 1970s and early-1980s, including The Mary Tyler
Moore Show, All in the Family, Barney Miller, and Taxi. Perhaps what most distinguishes
the Korean War dramedy from these other network series, besides its period setting, are the
dialectical tensions between events and non-events, love letters and hate mail, realism and
artifice, quotidian observations and extraordinary circumstances. These tensions, evident
throughout the series, are especially pronounced in the show’s two mock documentary
episodes – the Season Four finale “The Interview” and an hour-long episode from Season
Seven, “Our Finest Hour” (7.04) – both of which feature Clete Roberts asking the men and
women of the 4077 what they do to unwind after a long work shift.24
One of Roberts’s questions in the latter episode – “What do you do to relax here?” –
elicits a number of responses. Hawkeye talks about drinking to unwind, and then describes
himself as “a social director of the heart” (this leads to clips of him with Lt. Dish and
other nurses). Father Mulcahy discusses the importance of poker, which builds camaraderie
among the men. Klinger says that he is “too busy to relax” in his new capacity as company
clerk, a job he inherited from Radar after the latter’s departure. The range of opinions on
the subject attests to the variety of ways in which recreational activities play a pivotal role
in maintaining the group’s morale. Indeed, Hawkeye’s comment in the episode “Bulletin
Board” – “If we don’t go crazy once in a while, we’ll all go crazy” – resonates with
M∗ A∗ S∗ H’s frequent foregrounding of leisure, games, sports, alcohol consumption, and
sex, which all function (to varying degrees of success) as a means for the men and women
of the 4077 to temporarily escape the “organized bore” that is war (a sentiment articulated
by B.J., who quotes Justice Holmes in a letter to his wife in “Dear Peggy”).
As alluded to at the beginning of this essay, “deluge” refers to periods when there
are heavy casualties, and when doctors are forced to work long stretches that, at the
very least, break the boredom. The specter of nothingness—itself an extreme—could be
managed by means of coping mechanisms such as alcohol and pranks, which minimized
the psychological effects of prolonged exposure to war. When they are not fighting bouts
of dysentery and rabies, the men and women of the 4077 can usually be seen either
watching movies or playing some type of game or sport, including chess (“The Abduction
of Margaret Houlihan” [5.06]), football (“The Army-Navy Game” [1.20]), basketball (“Of
Moose and Men” [4.11]), and, of course, poker (in “As You Were” [2.20], Hawkeye and
 300 David Scott Diffrient and Hye Seung Chung

Trapper play this while wearing gorilla suits). Explaining his readiness to attempt a new
medical procedure in “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” [7.09], Hawkeye tells Potter, “We’re in the
fourth quarter of a very tight ball game Colonel. I think its time to go in for the big play.”
Similarly, in “Letters,” the basketball-playing colonel’s string of thirty-two free throws
becomes a metaphor for the focus, dedication, and persistence needed to work as a surgeon
during the Korean War. In these and many other cases, sports take on symbolic meanings,
much like the intersquad football game in Altman’s film is, according to General Hammond,
a means of “keeping the American way of life going in Asia.”
The episode “Bug Out” (5.01) is indicative of how creative and desperate people can be
when put into extreme situations, in which practically anything can be transformed into an
object of amusement and a means of diversion. In the midst of a chaotic bug-out, Hawkeye
and Radar drop by Rosie’s Bar for farewell drinks. Spotting a cockroach under the table,
Hawkeye tries to stomp on it but misses. Radar recognizes the limping bug and calls it “Blue
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Velvet,” to which Hawkeye adds, “B.J.’s racing cockroach. . .one of the great thoroughbred
cockroaches in Korea.” Although the idea of “cockroach racing” might sound absurd, it
is not entirely far-fetched. In fact, American prisoners of war (POWs) in the Korean War
partook in a similar engagement with flies to escape boredom and make modest gains.
According to Akira Chikami, a Japanese American marine who was captured by
North Koreans in August 1951 and interned in Camps Five and Twelve, Chinese guards in
the former camp invited American POWs to participate in a “fly-killing campaign” on a
voluntary basis. As an incentive for participation, one pack of Chinese cigarettes was given
as a reward for every 200 flies turned in. Many soldiers joined the campaign, made various
flytraps, and sometimes cheated by manipulating the weight of flies. Chikami describes a
strategy used by one of his fellow prisoners who “cut a little sliver of. . . aluminum foil
and then pushed it up into the abdomen of the fly. Ten of his flies weighed more than two
hundred normal flies. He’d mix them up a little bit. The Chinese could never figure out how
come his flies weighed so much more than anybody else’s. We did crazy things like this to
produce a little entertainment and to break the boredom.”25
Even Dr. Sidney Freedman, a bastion of rational thought, is not above playing so
bizarre a game as cockroach racing. In the aforementioned “Dear Sigmund,” Sidney pulls
out of a high-stakes poker game (in which even Margaret is seen playing). Before turning
his attention to a letter addressed to Sigmund Freud that he has been putting off for some
time, Sidney explains how he lost his money the night before:

Sidney: I’m out. I blew everything last night on Radar’s cockroach races.
Radar: He had the winner but it came in rider-less.
Klinger: Rider-less?
Radar: The fly fell off.

By the end of this episode, after a fortnight of tomfoolery, Freedman has come to appreciate
the Swampmen’s penchant for practical jokes, perhaps the most cathartic, least objection-
able way they have managed to cope with their situation. Significantly, Sidney was first
introduced in an episode from the Second Season (“Deal Me Out”) revolving around poker.
Ever a faithful disciple of Freud, Sidney identifies libidinal desire as the psychiatric basis
for playing this and other games, going on to say, “Sex is why we drink, sex is why we
give birth.” Although Sidney would continue to pop into camp throughout the series (in
such episodes as “Bless You, Hawkeye” [9.17] and “Goodbye, Cruel World” [8.21]), it
was this first appearance – and his explicit assertion that what ultimately drives men is sex
(the mother of all games) – that most impacted how audiences would come to perceive the
 TV Hybridity: Genre Mixing and Narrative Complexity in M∗ A∗ S∗ H 301

centrality of this theme in relation not only to Hawkeye’s transformative masculinity but
also to M∗ A∗ S∗ H itself.
Thus, M∗ A∗ S∗ H combines episodic and serialistic approaches to televisual storytelling,
inviting audiences to form hypotheses and draw conclusions about stock characters and
comic situations, episode-to-episode, only to challenge those assumptions through experi-
mental narratives that reveal the constructedness of traditional representational modes and
signifying practices. It does this as a “producerly text,” one that consolidates traditional
“readerly” snares designed to hook the audience (stringing viewers along season-to-season
while immersing them in a continuously evolving narrative) and “writerly” invitations
to those spectators who—through accrued knowledge of the series—are asked to fill in
the gaps of its fissure-filled storylines. During the show’s original broadcast, its profun-
dities, with regard to the psychological and emotional turmoil experienced by doctors,
nurses, soldiers, and civilians during war, deepened each week, yet sat side-by-side with
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broadly comedic and mundane moments that tonally underscored the durational, exis-
tential, and phenomenological extremes endured by actual members of MASH units in
Korea (not to mention military personnel stationed overseas during and after the program’s
original run).
It is, in every way, a hybrid text, not only in terms of its generic affiliations (comedy
and drama) and aesthetic modes (televisual and filmic), but also in being situated between
effervescent humor and somber didacticism, nostalgic sentimentality and biting satire,
1950s idealism and 1970s cynicism. Given this contradictory combination, it is perhaps
difficult to say with certainty what the show’s overarching ideological orientation is; where
its producers and writers stand on divisive issues that remain relevant today (particularly in
light of recent events at home and in Afghanistan and Iraq). Nevertheless, as Yvonne Tasker
states, “In the current war on terror, one which lacks clear temporal or spatial definition,
the ways in which M∗ A∗ S∗ H enacted a process of living with war, and with moral outrage,
via television are perhaps instructive.”26
Perhaps such textual “heteroglossia,” in the Fiskean sense, reveals the relative absence
of a governing hand in this so-called consensus medium, for television provides numerous
ideological positions, spectatorial entryways, and embedded voices that “cannot finally be
pinned down in a ‘hierarchy of discourses’.” As Fiske states, “[D]ifferent readers can ‘listen’
more or less attentively to different voices.”27 However constructed the show’s internal
heteroglossia may be, and despite being mediated through the authorial visions of the
program’s producers and writers—it is consonant with broader cultural and social changes
occurring throughout M∗ A∗ S∗ H’s eleven-year run, a period that spanned four Presidential
administrations and witnessed significant transformations in the way that racial and sexual
minorities were portrayed in the media and perceived by the mainstream.
One wonders if the ultimate barometer of the series’ continued popularity in the
United States and abroad—besides the many intertextual references to it in more recent,
similarly hybridized television shows (such as Mystery Science Theater 3000 [1988–1999],
The Simpsons [1989-], and Family Guy)—is the preponderance of M∗ A∗ S∗ H “mash-ups”
online, at file-sharing sites such as YouTube, where the practice of mixing seemingly
unrelated audiovisual components has become an operative means of daily intercultural
communication. Time will only tell if this generically hybrid, narratively complex series
will continue to inspire new generations of audiences in the ever-expanding world of
converging technologies and new media. However, what is certain is that, in this era
of senseless war and ceaseless terrorism, the messages and sentiments of M∗ A∗ S∗ H, in
addition to its narrative experiments, are as fresh and provocative as they were in the early-
1970s.
 302 David Scott Diffrient and Hye Seung Chung

Notes
∗ ∗ ∗
1. See, for instance, Elisabeth Weis, “M A S H Notes,” in Andrew Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal,
eds., Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998),
310–326; and James H. Wittebols, Watching M∗ A∗ S∗ H, Watching America: A Social History of
the 1972–1983 Television Series (McFarland and Company, 2003).
2. David Marc, Comic Visions: Television Comedy and American Culture, 2nd edition (Malden,
MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 136–137.
3. For more information about the show’s representational strategies and playful yet problematic
approach to identity politics, particularly with regard to its depiction of North and South Koreans,
see David Scott Diffrient, M∗ A∗ S∗ H (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008).
4. The comparatively short-lived wartime medical drama China Beach (ABC, 1988–1991), created
by William Broyles, Jr. and John Sacret Young, is perhaps the only other long-form television
series besides M∗ A∗ S∗ H to consistently explore both the physical and psychological effects of
combat on soldiers as well as civilians. Also, like the Korean War dramedy, China Beach high-
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lights, through its ensemble format, the redemptive aspects of communal support and romantic
entanglements during a time of war (in this case, the Vietnam conflict, as seen primarily from
the perspective of several nurses).
5. Richard Hooker, MASH (New York: Perennial, 2001), 5–6.
6. Yvonne Tasker, “Comic Situations/Endless War: M∗ A∗ S∗ H and War as Entertainment,” in Rikke
Schubart, Fabian Virchow, Debra White-Stanley, and Tanja Thomas, eds., War Isn’t Hell, It’s
Entertainment: Essays on Visual Media and the Representation of Conflict (McFarland, 2009),
140.
7. History is in flux throughout M∗ A∗ S∗ H, a series that frequently moves back in time – from 1952
to 1951 and forward again – episode to episode, season to season.
8. Tasker, 135.
9. Hooker, 103.
10. Ibid., 111.
11. Jason Mittell, Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture (New
York: Routledge, 2004), 155.
12. John Fiske, Television Culture (London: Methuen, 1987), 95.
13. As Yvonne Tasker notes, “In its absence the U.S. is figured as a site of leisure, ease and
abundance” that negatively shadows the lack of material comforts in Korea, a place that members
of the medical staff strive to transform into a space for momentary play (144).
14. Carl Freedman, “History, Fiction, Film, Television, Myth: The Ideology of M∗ A∗ S∗ H,” The
Southern Review, Vol. 26 (1990): 98.
15. Sarah Kozloff, “Narrative Theory and Television,” Channels of Discourse, Reassembled, ed.
Robert C. Allen (London: Routledge, 1992), 57.
16. Ibid., 58.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., 68.
19. Fiske, 113.
20. Ibid., 114–115.
21. Harry Castleman and Walter J. Podrazik, Watching TV: Six Decades of American Television,
second edition (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2004), 234.
22. Tasker, 132.
23. Ibid.
24. For a longer discussion of “The Interview” and “Our Finest Hour,” see: Diffrient, 63–74.
25. Lewis H. Carlson, Remembered Prisoners of a Forgotten War: An Oral History of Korean War
POWs (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2002), 45–46.
26. Tasker, 144.
27. Fiske, 96.