If I have stuff to write, then why don't I just write it for me?
The Harry Morgan train has officially pulled into the M*A*S*H station.
Me: "I can't watch seven seasons of M*A*S*H! I won't have any time! I won't have any focus! I won't have any retinas!"
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spatch: "You don't have to watch seven seasons of M*A*S*H!"
Me: "But I'm going to run out of film noir!"
(Topper: it's eight seasons, counting inclusively.)
Me: "I never had this problem with Van Heflin!"
Me: "I can't watch seven seasons of M*A*S*H! I won't have any time! I won't have any focus! I won't have any retinas!"
spatch: "You don't have to watch seven seasons of M*A*S*H!"Me: "But I'm going to run out of film noir!"
(Topper: it's eight seasons, counting inclusively.)
Me: "I never had this problem with Van Heflin!"
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I am still acclimating to the quarter-century time jump which always goes the other way for
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So you don't want me to leave our high-quality source here?
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I could run out of film noir with Harry Morgan in it!
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Well then: carry on!
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XD I hope not! But if you do, in Van Heflin's case, at least you can follow with his westerns, right?<3
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I have owed a review of 3:10 to Yuma (1957) for the last seven years.
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(This show was on reruns when I was a teenager, so I watched nearly all of it. I've only seen scattered episodes since then. I suspect I'd like it even better as an adult when I get more of the context.)
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May I ask?
[edit] You really are not obliged to answer, but having had occasion to return to this post, I just wanted to make clear that this question was curiosity rather than "how very dare."
(This show was on reruns when I was a teenager, so I watched nearly all of it. I've only seen scattered episodes since then. I suspect I'd like it even better as an adult when I get more of the context.)
I'd seen almost none of it! I have no memories of it from childhood even though it would have been permanently on TV. In grad school, a friend showed me a couple of episodes from the fourth and eighth seasons and in the phase after grad school when I lay around and stared at the television a lot, I managed to stare at most of the first season. As of seven episodes into the fourth season, I seem to be enjoying it a lot.
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Yeah, that's where Dan Duryea comes in.
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Heh. It has been working out with film noir and the occasional Western so far.
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Season 4 is super-strong in general, and (if you haven't already gotten to it) includes what might be my #1 favorite episode of the series, "Quo Vadis, Captain Chandler?" (Though in truth I have a number of favorites!)
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I am enjoying the heck out of him and Season 4.
Season 4 is super-strong in general, and (if you haven't already gotten to it) includes what might be my #1 favorite episode of the series, "Quo Vadis, Captain Chandler?" (Though in truth I have a number of favorites!)
We just caught that one! Tell me some of your other favorites! Immaterial if from later seasons (or earlier).
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You might already have heard of some of these, but for earlier eps: Season 1 is by and large really rough, as they were still trying to find their footing, but "Sometimes You Hear the Bullet" is definitely worth a watch, and foreshadows the show's transition into dramedy, as opposed to straight comedy. (It also features a pre-Happy Days Ron Howard.)
From season 2, I'm fond of "Crisis" (maybe because it's the first episode I can remember watching as an adult?), and "George" immediately following it is notable for the way it handles a gay character.
Season 3 is pretty solid overall, imo, but in particular you might be interested in the opener, "The General Flipped At Dawn," as it features Harry Morgan in a non-Potter role, hah. And then the finale, "Abyssinia, Henry," is not only a hell of an episode, but provides context for Potter's arrival in season 4.
For later eps, seasons 4-6 are really strong in general, but some standouts (that you haven't already gotten to) are the season 4 finale, "The Interview," and the season 6 opener, "Fade In, Fade Out," as it introduces David Ogden Stiers as Major Winchester.
Season 7 has the experimental "Point of View," which is told entirely from the first-person POV of a patient, and I also dearly love "Dear Sis" (but then, Father Mulcahy is my favorite character, so I pretty much like any episode that focuses on him or otherwise lets him shine).
Season 8 has the experimental "Life Time" (told in real time!), and the much-lauded and surreal "Dreams" (otherwise known as that time the 4077th fell into the Twilight Zone). Season 10's "Follies of the Living, Concerns of the Dead" takes a similarly surreal turn to neat effect.
I could mention more, but I think that's enough for now! All I'll add (since it's relevant to "Quo Vadis, Captain Chandler?") is that one of my favorite bits of headcanon I've ever run across is someone who proposed that the conspiracy-theory-loving Colonel Flagg is Fox Mulder's dad (from the X-Files, yes).
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I can never promise to follow up on recommendations, but I almost never mind them! My bandwidth for TV is just much smaller than for film.
You might already have heard of some of these, but for earlier eps: Season 1 is by and large really rough, as they were still trying to find their footing, but "Sometimes You Hear the Bullet" is definitely worth a watch, and foreshadows the show's transition into dramedy, as opposed to straight comedy. (It also features a pre-Happy Days Ron Howard.)
That one I have seen! I technically watched most of the first season at a point in my life when I couldn't do much except lie on the couch and stare at the TV and one of the things that was on a channel I sometimes stared at was the eternally syndicated M*A*S*H, although it's up for debate how many of the details entered my long-term memory. I am not sure I saw any of the second season. I'm not even sure I saw the first season in order.
From season 2, I'm fond of "Crisis" (maybe because it's the first episode I can remember watching as an adult?), and "George" immediately following it is notable for the way it handles a gay character.
Okay; that's neat. I am not familiar with either one of those.
Season 3 is pretty solid overall, imo, but in particular you might be interested in the opener, "The General Flipped At Dawn," as it features Harry Morgan in a non-Potter role, hah. And then the finale, "Abyssinia, Henry," is not only a hell of an episode, but provides context for Potter's arrival in season 4.
We did in fact watch "The General Flipped at Dawn" for Harry Morgan ("Not now, Marjorie, I'm inspecting the troops") and I have been shown "Abyssinia, Henry" on the general strength of its hell of an episode. Rob has explained that it is not possible to overrate the impact of main character death in a comedy when the show aired.
For later eps, seasons 4-6 are really strong in general, but some standouts (that you haven't already gotten to) are the season 4 finale, "The Interview," and the season 6 opener, "Fade In, Fade Out," as it introduces David Ogden Stiers as Major Winchester.
"The Interview" is actually one of the few episodes of M*A*S*H I had not only seen coming into this experience, but specifically remembered: a grad school friend showed it to me along with "Morale Victory" from Season 8 (I feel as though there may have been one or two others that I'll recognize when we get to them). Two moments from it had stuck with me vividly for twenty years.
Season 7 has the experimental "Point of View," which is told entirely from the first-person POV of a patient, and I also dearly love "Dear Sis" (but then, Father Mulcahy is my favorite character, so I pretty much like any episode that focuses on him or otherwise lets him shine).
He is emerging as one of my favorites, too, so I don't mind. "Point of View" is on my radar for its format and I am trying to figure out if it's one of the ones I might recognize or if I've just had its conceit described to me before.
Season 8 has the experimental "Life Time" (told in real time!), and the much-lauded and surreal "Dreams" (otherwise known as that time the 4077th fell into the Twilight Zone). Season 10's "Follies of the Living, Concerns of the Dead" takes a similarly surreal turn to neat effect.
None of these ring any bells, all of them sound fantastic, and if I make it that far into the show, I'll look out for them! Or just watch them independently if I burn out on the cumulative experience. Regardless, thanks for the list.
I could mention more, but I think that's enough for now! All I'll add (since it's relevant to "Quo Vadis, Captain Chandler?") is that one of my favorite bits of headcanon I've ever run across is someone who proposed that the conspiracy-theory-loving Colonel Flagg is Fox Mulder's dad (from the X-Files, yes).
"You're a victim too, Flagg. But you're such an unbelievable example of walking fertilizer, it's hard for me to care."
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In any event, it'll be neat to hear what you think of the later episodes (and I guess the series as a whole?) as you get further along! MASH will always be inextricably linked with Star Trek in my mind, as my local station growing up played them one right after another in reruns (for the longest time it was TNG at midnight, DS9 at 1 AM, and then a 3-hour block of MASH from 2-5, so I'd often catch the opening credits). But I never actually got into the series until early college, when I started watching with my boyfriend at the time. (Something about the 70s' color palette, and the fact that I thought it was a straight drama, turned me off as a kid.
Something, something, the folly of youth.) Needless to say, I quickly fell in love upon exposure to it as a young adult.no subject
Oh, good, you found the fic I came back to this conversation to link you to.
Also wanted to mention that "The Interview" was as powerful as I had remembered it and more so in context of having seen more of these people and understanding what they are or are not sharing with the journalist and the audience which is extra-diegetically us. The two moments I had remembered with reasonable accuracy were Father Mulcahy's story of the surgeons limbering their fingers in the warmth of the steam that rises from an opened body and Frank utterly freezing—augmented humorously but tellingly by a cut in the footage, implying he froze a lot longer than we even see onscreen—when asked a normal human-connecting question. In light of his colorfully bowdlerized profanity in normal episodes, I appreciate that Potter in the more realist frame of "The Interview" gets bleeped in his very first sentence on camera and I have no idea how I forgot Radar's story about the earthworms. Reading that most of the answers were improvised in character is not only a testament to how well the actors knew the people they were playing, it's a nice layer on lines like Hawkeye's description of war as "like when it rains in New York and everybody crowds into doorways," which is maybe not the sort of thing a guy from a small town in southern Maine would say, but Alan Alda definitely would. Season 4 overall, terrific.
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And yesss, "The Interview" is so good for so many reasons. <3 They bring Clete Roberts back for a second interview in one of the later seasons, and while it isn't quite as good as the first, it at least lends some more weight to what otherwise would have just been a standard budget-saving clip show.