TV Hybridity: Genre Mixing and Narrative Complexity in M*A*S*H

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Notes

1. See, for instance, Elisabeth Weis, “M*A*S*H Notes,” in Andrew Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal, eds., Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 310–326; and James H. Wittebols, Watching M*A*S*H, Watching America: A Social History of the 1972–1983 Television Series (McFarland and Company, 2003).

2. David Marc, Comic Visions: Television Comedy and American Culture, 2nd edition (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 136–137.

3. For more information about the show's representational strategies and playful yet problematic approach to identity politics, particularly with regard to its depiction of North and South Koreans, see David Scott Diffrient, M*A*S*H (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008).

4. The comparatively short-lived wartime medical drama China Beach (ABC, 1988–1991), created by William Broyles, Jr. and John Sacret Young, is perhaps the only other long-form television series besides M*A*S*H to consistently explore both the physical and psychological effects of combat on soldiers as well as civilians. Also, like the Korean War dramedy, China Beach highlights, through its ensemble format, the redemptive aspects of communal support and romantic entanglements during a time of war (in this case, the Vietnam conflict, as seen primarily from the perspective of several nurses).

5. Richard Hooker, MASH (New York: Perennial, 2001), 5–6.

6. Yvonne Tasker, “Comic Situations/Endless War: M*A*S*H and War as Entertainment,” in Rikke Schubart, Fabian Virchow, Debra White-Stanley, and Tanja Thomas, eds., War Isn't Hell, It's Entertainment: Essays on Visual Media and the Representation of Conflict (McFarland, 2009), 140.

7. History is in flux throughout M*A*S*H, a series that frequently moves back in time – from 1952 to 1951 and forward again – episode to episode, season to season.

8. Tasker, 135.

9. Hooker, 103.

10. Ibid., 111.

11. Jason Mittell, Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004), 155.

12. John Fiske, Television Culture (London: Methuen, 1987), 95.

13. As Yvonne Tasker notes, “In its absence the U.S. is figured as a site of leisure, ease and abundance” that negatively shadows the lack of material comforts in Korea, a place that members of the medical staff strive to transform into a space for momentary play (144).

14. Carl Freedman, “History, Fiction, Film, Television, Myth: The Ideology of M*A*S*H,” The Southern Review, Vol. 26 (1990): 98.

15. Sarah Kozloff, “Narrative Theory and Television,” Channels of Discourse, Reassembled, ed. Robert C. Allen (London: Routledge, 1992), 57.

16. Ibid., 58.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid., 68.

19. Fiske, 113.

20. Ibid., 114–115.

21. Harry Castleman and Walter J. Podrazik, Watching TV: Six Decades of American Television, second edition (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2004), 234.

22. Tasker, 132.

23. Ibid.

24. For a longer discussion of “The Interview” and “Our Finest Hour,” see: Diffrient, 63–74.

25. Lewis H. Carlson, Remembered Prisoners of a Forgotten War: An Oral History of Korean War POWs (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2002), 45–46.

26. Tasker, 144.

27. Fiske, 96.