'M*A*S*H' Special Airing on New Year's Day — But Not on CBS
The two-hour special will include new and archival interviews from the cast and crew of the popular war medical dramedy.
2024 is almost here, and fans of M*A*S*H will be able to ring it in in a big way. The war medical dramedy aired on CBS for 11 seasons from 1972 to 1983, with just over 250 episodes. Starring an ensemble cast that included Alan Alda, Wayne Rogers, McClea Steveson, Loretta Swit, Gary Burghoff, Mike Farrell, and Jamie Farr, the series was adapted from the 1970 feature film of the same name, which was based on Richard Hooker's 1968 novel, MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors. It followed a team of doctors and support staff stationed at a mobile army surgical hospital during the Korean War. Now, 50 years after the series ended, a new special is premiering.
According to TVLine, the two-hour special M*A*S*H: The Comedy That Changed Television will be premiering on New Year's Day. Instead of airing on home network CBS, however, it will instead be airing on Fox. The special will include new interviews with series stars Alan Alda (Capt. Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce), Loretta Swit (Maj. Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan), Gary Burghoff (Cp. Walter "Radar" O'Reilly), Jamie Farr (Cp. And Sgt. Maxwell Q. "Max" Klinger), and Mike Farrell (Capt. B.J. Hunnicutt). Interviews with the late Wayne Rogers (Capt. "Trapper" John McIntyre) and William Christopher (Father Francis Mulcahy), who died in 2015 and 2016, respectively, will also be featured.
On top of the cast interviews, executive producers Gene Reynolds and Burt Metcalfe will be getting the interview treatment, while archival Q&As will feature writer and producer Larry Gelbart and other cast members such as Larry Linville (Maj. Frank Burns), Harry Morgan (Col. Sherman T. Potter), McLean Stevenson (Lt. Col. Henry Blake), and the late David Ogden Stiers (Maj. Charles Emerson Winchester III).
M*A*S*H: The Comedy That Changed Television executive producers John Scheinfeld and Andy Kaplan discussed the special with TVLine, and Scheinfeld gave a background on how the special came to be. He had been friends with Reynolds and Metcalfe, who were also his mentors, and they got to talking about doing some type of proper documentary on the series. Knowing that people were getting older, they "cobbled some money together and had interviews with all the living cast members, and those are the interviews you see in the special." Long story short, they originally sold it to CBS, but with some behind-the-scenes changes, it ended up not happening despite their push over the years until "Fox decided this was the time to do it."
It is going to be a great way to kick off the new year, but fans may want to have some tissues. The special is said to be "wonderfully thorough and incredibly moving" and "sometimes highly emotional." Viewers will be able to check it out and judge for themselves, when M*A*S*H: The Comedy That Changed Television premieres this Monday, Jan. 1, 2024 at 8 p.m. ET on Fox.