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I finally reached the end of my watch through of MASH - all 11 seasons of it. And yes, I'd have reached the end sooner if 2023 hasn't been The Year of Burn Notice when I watched BN all through four times and barely anything else...
I saw some MASH when I was a kid - my grandma used to watch it, and I saw some eps sometimes when I was visiting her, but that's different from a serial watch. The first few seasons are... patchy. It's a comedy very much of the time, with some entertaining moments, but also some moments that make you cringe with the sexism and racism.
Around season four and five, you can see when the creative control started to change hands. When the cast took more power and began to shape the narrative. When Loretta Swit walked out and wouldn't come back until her character was treated as a career woman instead of a sex object. And damn, do those later seasons hold up, even all these years afterwards. They address serious issues on every scale, from the traumas of war to the aforementioned sexism and racism, to overpowering familial expectations, to queer narratives. And obviously there are pure comedy episodes too, but the comedy stops being at the expense of any particular group. The character development is beautifully done, and yes, the ending absolutely made me cry.
MASH really shows what can happen when the people controlling a show care about what happens in it, are invested in it, and pour their souls into it. And unlike some shows where the creator was a visionary from the start, MASH was appropriated by the people who cared, and was completely transformed by it.
Now I'm considering what retro comedy from the American past that I missed out on to go to next, and I think it might have to be The Golden Girls...
I saw some MASH when I was a kid - my grandma used to watch it, and I saw some eps sometimes when I was visiting her, but that's different from a serial watch. The first few seasons are... patchy. It's a comedy very much of the time, with some entertaining moments, but also some moments that make you cringe with the sexism and racism.
Around season four and five, you can see when the creative control started to change hands. When the cast took more power and began to shape the narrative. When Loretta Swit walked out and wouldn't come back until her character was treated as a career woman instead of a sex object. And damn, do those later seasons hold up, even all these years afterwards. They address serious issues on every scale, from the traumas of war to the aforementioned sexism and racism, to overpowering familial expectations, to queer narratives. And obviously there are pure comedy episodes too, but the comedy stops being at the expense of any particular group. The character development is beautifully done, and yes, the ending absolutely made me cry.
MASH really shows what can happen when the people controlling a show care about what happens in it, are invested in it, and pour their souls into it. And unlike some shows where the creator was a visionary from the start, MASH was appropriated by the people who cared, and was completely transformed by it.
Now I'm considering what retro comedy from the American past that I missed out on to go to next, and I think it might have to be The Golden Girls...
