#unrelated but suddenly I realize that I found the laugh track jarring when watching later on and now realise it's perhaps because when#I watched the first time it wasn't there#huh#also watch mash it's made in the time it was but you can see as new ideas enter the show
Yeah there are two different shows starring Alan Alda called M*A*S*H.
One of those shows is a brilliant, deeply harrowing and deeply beautiful, exceptionally queer show about trying to retain your sanity and humanity when you are surrounded knee deep in dead bodies of children who are used as tissue paper by a corrupt and sadistic, greedy government, when you work for 50 hours without sleep stitching them up, you sleep for 2 hours and then wake up and stitch the same children back up again the next day because they've been sent back out again to die. A show about clinging desperately to the other humans around them just to try to maintain a human connection in a world determined to strip it completely from all of them. The show is, truly, in my opinion, one of the best television shows of all time.
And the other show ruins ALL of this with a horrible, tinny laugh track that destroys every beautiful moment the other show works so fucking hard to succeed in creating. Because everything is a joke.
As for being a product of its time, it is simultaneously well ahead of its time in terms of the intimate relationships, the story telling, the experimentation (real-time episodes, gothic dreams, the audience having the point of view, the political narratives, the incredible amalgamation of gothic and comedy and horror, the character narratives and ironic endings, etc. There's SO much to say that shows this show ahead of its time.
But they also do have problems that angered me when I watched it as a child, as well as now. Things that I believe damage how incredible this show was, as well as its legacy in history. And those flaws were not exclusive to M*A*S*H-- many other shows were doing the same mistakes at the time.
My main complaints about this show, I have similar complaints about many of the shows in the era.
The show was too white. Removing Oliver Jones and not having enough POC characters as I have said many times (here, here, here, here, for starters) was an absurd mistake they never should have made. They had an incredible opportunity to have a great POC character and they blew it. At least 1/3 of the soldiers historically should have been POC, and it's wild that the cast is as white as it is. The show is set in KOREA and yet the vast majority of the episodes don't even have someone Asian. The writer's room needed a consultant and at least one staff writer with knowledge on Asian culture, specifically Korean, and the show should have had at least one or two POC writers and producers.
The show was too male, both on-screen and behind the scenes. The nurses deserved to have a lot more presence, and there should have been women in the writer's room. Full stop. Alan Alda did a pretty good job of making the show more feminist, he made them stop with the season 1 rape jokes, but the women in that should should have had a voice.
The show could be occasionally homophobic/transphobic -- usually in relation to the character of Klinger. It's unnecessary, and as groundbreaking as his character was at times, he could also be regressive.
The later years become more and more conservative as the US moves away from the anti-Vietnam war and second wave feminist vibes and starts barrelling toward the Reagan and first Bush conservatism that starts locking American tv down into sanitised and saccharine "family-friendly" (ie, cis-het white conservative republican middle class targeted) material.
So M*A*S*H absolutely has its flaws, I certainly will not pretend otherwise. In fact, I'm probably more aware of the flaws than someone who hates the show. And there are absolutely bits of dialogue, scenes and entire episodes that frankly I just wish had never happened.
But even with all of this said, by and large, these complaints are minimal when compared to the quality and performances of the show. There are far more recent shows that I have much more severe complaints against who don't even have the excuse of being in the 1970s. Every show has flaws. Recognising these flaws doesn't erase just how powerful and incredible this show is.
I still believe, genuinely, even with these flaws, that M*A*S*H is one of the best US television shows that has ever been made, and deserves to be remembered as such.
Just without the fucking laugh track.
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