If I have stuff to write, then why don't I just write it for me?

[sovay]

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!"

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!"

Comments

[sovay]

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).

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.

[konstantya]

HAH, I actually read and fell in love with that fic years ago, and this discussion inspired me to hunt it back down (upon which I realized I'd somehow never favorited it or bookmarked it or anything???--so, fixed that). I was going to recommend it, myself, but obviously you found it without me!

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.