Throughout its eleven season run, “M*A*S*H” was one of the best-written shows on television. The beloved Korean War-set sitcom effortlessly blended genres in a way that was rare for its time, balancing uproarious comedy with gut-wrenching tragedy. The show won an Emmy for its writing and was nominated for eleven more, even taking over two thirds of the nominations in 1974.
Even the best shows have some weak moments, though, and not every episode or story beat in “M*A*S*H” is a winner. Some of the show’s plot points have aged poorly, especially in the early seasons, when jokester playboy Hawkeye’s (Alan Alda) treatment of head nurse Margaret (Loretta Swit) crossed over into sexual harassment. Other bits are just silly, like a season 1 gag involving a gold spray-painted car that Alda often references as his and Wayne Rogers’ barometer for how kooky the show could possibly get. “Wayne Rogers and I said to each other, where did we get gold paint in Korea? This is ridiculous,” Alda told “CBS This Morning” in 2013. “Anytime a story line came up that really didn’t seem credible to us, we would look at each other and say ‘gold jeep,’ but it didn’t always help to say that.”
A one-dimensional character in a thoughtful sitcom world
All in all, though, “M*A*S*H” had a surprisingly high hit rate, and the show often weathered major cast and creative transitions without missing a beat. Series creator Larry Gelbart, though, admitted that there was one character who got the worst of the writers’ work later in his run: Larry Linville’s Frank Burns. Frank often served as the uncool, status-quo-keeping counterpart to Hawkeye and his more raucous, morally complex coworkers. Frank was at once pompous and pathetic, a brownnoser who could never actually curry favor with authority figures because he was always in the wrong. In the progressive world of “M*A*S*H,” Frank was the zealot, the homophobe, the bully, and the borderline-fascist patriot. Except, in the later seasons, he was just kind of stupid.
“I’d have made Frank a little less silly,” Gelbart once admitted in an interview with Ed Solomonson for Solomonson and Mark O’Neill’s book “TV’s ‘M*A*S*H’: The Ultimate Guide Book.” The author asked Gelbart if he would change “any specific feature of a character” if he could go back and do things differently, and Gelbart was clear that he saw relatively static character Frank as a series weak point. “There would be the occasional show where he would get drunk, try to be one of the guys,” Gelbart said. “That’s the one thing I would do [differently]. I’d make him a little less inane before the fifth season.” The writer called Frank’s characterization “just lazy writing” and “coasting with what you know works.”
Did Frank Burns deserve better?
It’s true that in the show’s later seasons, Frank went from a terrible (though hilariously ineffective) force of political opposition to the show’s more liberal characters to a bit of a more broadly written loser. While other characters grew and changed, he stayed mostly the same until he finally left the show in season 5. The obnoxious one-dimensionality of Linville’s character is often cited as a reason he didn’t renew his contract after the first five years, though he apparently also wanted to return to live theater. After Frank left, he was replaced by the equally snooty but much more profoundly written Charles Winchester (David Ogden Stiers), and he and the rest of the ensemble continued to evolve in a way that was unusual for sitcom characters of their time — and, frankly, still is today.
Talented comedic actor Linville may have deserved better than Frank’s non-arc, but in an environment as chaotic and ridiculous as “M*A*S*H,” it was also nice that the 4077th could always rely on one another to set aside their struggles long enough to agree on one thing: “Frank Burns eats worms.”
