M*A*S*H (Series, The) (DVD)

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When the show debuted, America was enmeshed in an unpopular war. But like war itself, "M*A*S*H" just kept on going long after the Vietnam conflict ended. Set during the Korean War rather than in contemporary times, "M*A*S*H" debuted in 1972 and was so popular that it ran 11 seasons, while the Korean War lasted only three years.

It didn't matter if only one actor-Gary Burghoff, who played Corporal Walter "Radar" O'Reilly until 1979-was the only holdover from the hit 1970 Robert Altman film to play a main character in the TV version, or that creator Larry Gelbart took Altman's dark comedy and made it a brighter (and funnier) one for CBS.

It didn't even matter if four key original cast members left (Wayne Rogers, Larry Linville, McLean Stevenson, and Gary Burghoff). The actors who stepped in to replace them (Mike Farrell, Harry Morgan, David Ogden Stiers, and Jamie Farr) in this popular serio-sitcom found that the writing in "M*A*S*H" was so good that audiences bought the changes in personnel as an inevitable fact of military life.

"M*A*S*H" was nominated for Outstanding Comedy Series 10 years out of 11, and won the Emmy in 1974. This final season, the two-and-a-half hour finale drew the largest audience ever to watch a single television program. If you hate long goodbyes, you're not going to like the last half-hour of the wrap-up, but it follows the formula that had kept the show in the Nielsen Top-10 all but two seasons-its first, when mass audiences had yet to discover the show, and Season 4, when the show finished in the #14 spot. There's the usual blend of operating room blood, wise-cracks, lechery/romance, military snafus, and tension-relieving shenanigans that sustained the show from the very beginning.

Somewhere in Korea a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) had the best surgeons with the sharpest scalpels and wits. Alan Alda played Hawkeye Pierce for all 11 years, and teamed with Rogers first and later Farrell it made for a great one-two comedy punch. The brunt of their humor was directed at either head nurse Margaret "Hot Lips" Hoolihan (Loretta Swit) or their more reserved bunkmate and fellow surgeon, the incompetent Frank Burns (Linville), who was replaced by the arrogant Charles Emerson Winchester (Stiers). By the final season, Corporal Klinger (Farr) had stopped wearing the dresses that he hoped would get him out of the army, and his love interest, Soon-Lee (Rosalind Chao) would become the nation's in the final episode. As the gang finally leaves Korea, Hawkeye has another (more serious) breakdown and encounter, Father Mulcahy (William Christopher) turns a deaf ear while trying to help Korean POWs, Sgt. Rizzo (G.W. Bailey) tries to scam transportation out of Korea for everyone, and Col. Sherman Potter (Morgan) presides over a series of final good-byes that seems to go on forever.

If you've watched "M*A*S*H" in syndication on late-night television, you might be surprised to see that a number of randomly rotating episodes that are played frequently actually come from the final season. There was no drop-off in quality over the years, and though the writers (and Alda) may have gone to the temporary insanity well a few too many times-same with those all-serious "message" episodes-the episodes had the same crispness to them as in the very first season.

Here's a rundown on the episodes:

1) "Hey, Look Me Over"-After an enemy advance forces the nurses to bug out and the doctors end up trashing the place, Margaret learns that an I-Corps inspector is coming.

2) "Trick or Treatment"-The 4077th Halloween party takes a ghoulish turn when casualties roll in . . . and one of them isn't as dead as everyone seems to think.