'M*A*S*H' Helped Shape the Man I Am Today

Photo: CBS

by Julian Spivey
“M*A*S*H” is celebrating the 50th anniversary of its premiere on Saturday, Sept. 17 and there are many of my parents and their parents’ generation who were lucky enough to see one of the greatest television series of all-time live in its original run on CBS.


​I’m one of those who came to the show later on through the many re-runs in syndication. To this very day “M*A*S*H” can be found somewhere on your TV guide on a daily basis – one of only a handful of shows (“Gunsmoke” and “The Andy Griffith Show” two more I know of) that have likely been somewhere on television every day since their original runs ended.

I was introduced to “M*A*S*H” when the Hallmark Channel became its exclusive home on cable TV in September of 2013, the week of my 16th birthday. I would get home from school in the afternoon and watch back-to-back episodes of the show five days a week. When you watch 10 episodes a week it doesn’t take long to make your way through a series, even one that aired more than 200 episodes.

I’m the kind of pop culture fan who honestly believes the shows, movies, songs, etc. that I love have changed my life and played a role in the person I am today. I think “M*A*S*H” is one of these pop culture things that has formed whom I’ve become and done so for the better. Its morals and view of the world helped me become a compassionate, ethical being. I likely would’ve turned into one either way, but this show mixed with the other shows and films I loved around this time, and the music I grew to love in my teens and into my twenties helped me see it was the right way to live.

Hawkeye Pierce is my favorite television character of all time. He’s very likely my favorite fictional character period. He always stood up for the little guy. He despised bigotry and racism. He hated violence, though it appeared everywhere around him. He showed what the best of humanity could look like. The performance by Alan Alda and the writing/creation from Larry Gelbart and others of the character in the TV series (which was truly different from its predecessor in the novel and film version) made a lasting impression on me at 16, much the same way listening to Bruce Springsteen and Johnny Cash had and would and the performances of everyman actors like James Stewart and Henry Fonda in classic films would. I began to seek out this kind of moralistic entertainment. I still do to this day nearly 20 years later.

A lot has been made about the era of Peak TV and the proliferation of the anti-hero. Don’t get me wrong there are plenty of anti-heroes I’ve enjoyed watching both on television and in film, but there’s something about heroes – the old-fashioned kind – that just can’t be beaten. Hawkeye Pierce, though I know he’s a fictional man, is one of my heroes and has been since the moment I got to know him and his mostly heroic and moralistic cohorts on what I consider to be the greatest TV series ever.

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