The classic wartime sitcom “M*A*S*H” has since become one of the most beloved and important shows in television history, but when it was first being developed in the early 1970s, not everyone involved was sure it could work. Series star Alan Alda, who played Captain Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce, had some pretty serious initial concerns early on, though he eventually ended up being perhaps the most influential voice on the entire series, as he both wrote and directed episodes and was the only actor to appear in every episode. Though the show would undergo some pretty major cast changes and would even lose one of the series creators after the fourth season, Alda is sort of a guiding light throughout, the show’s heart and soul and moral center.
Over the years, Alda has revealed some of his early hesitations regarding his starring role in “M*A*S*H,” and most of it revolved around how war was depicted. Alda served as an officer in Korea just after the war ended, and he wanted to make sure that the wartime experience depicted on screen didn’t give anyone at home the wrong idea about the horrors of war.
Alda was concerned about how war would be depicted
Though Alda didn’t serve during wartime and he wasn’t in combat, he did see the effects the war had on soldiers who were still there from the war, along with the scars left on the land and the Korean people. He told NPR:
“I understood just from doing that that when you’re in a war, it’s real. It’s the real thing. People are going to get killed or lose their arms and legs. And when we did ‘M*A*S*H,’ I wanted to make sure that at least that understanding that I had came out — that that’s what we dealt with, and that we didn’t gloss over that and make the show about how funny things were in the mess tent.”
On top of being insistent that the series wasn’t just a bunch of hilarity and hijinks, Alda was also worried that the series would be pro-war. In Raymond Strait’s 1983 biography about the actor (via MeTV), he says that Alda’s greatest concern “was that the show would become a thirty-minute commercial for the Army.” Thankfully, he had a conversation with the show’s creators, Larry Gelbart and Gene Reynolds, and all three agreed that they wanted to do a show about the realities of war, neither glamorizing the blood and guts nor hiding the brutality entirely. This would turn out to be a somewhat controversial decision, at least for some “M*A*S*H” creatives who had come before.
Most people loved M*A*S*H, but not Robert Altman or Richard Hornberger
“M*A*S*H” did extremely well, running for 11 seasons and setting records that will likely never be broken, but at least two people weren’t fans: the book’s author, Richard Hornberger, and the director behind the 1970 film, Robert Altman. Hornberger’s book was pretty strongly pro-military, and Altman’s version was pretty hardcore about the sex and violence without much respect for the actual impacts of war. Altman decried the show as racist (even though the Koreans, both South and North, are depicted with love and care in the series for the most part), while Hornberger really hated Hawkeye and Alda’s more liberal leanings making their impact on the show.
In the end, Alda was probably onto something, as his impact on the show helped make it into a long-running success that still means a lot to people more than 50 years after it first aired.
