Why the Definitive M*A*S*H Special Aired on Fox, Not CBS — and Other Burning Questions Answered

On Monday, Jan. 1, M*A*S*H fans are invited to ring in the new year with M*A*S*H: The Comedy That Changed Television, a two-hour special airing on Fox and featuring new interviews with series vets Alan Alda (who played Capt. Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce), Loretta Swit (Maj. Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan), Gary Burghoff (Cpl. Walter “Radar” O’Reilly), Jamie Farr (Cpl./Sgt. Maxwell Q. “Max” Klinger) and Mike Farrell (Capt. B.J. Hunnicutt), as well as the late Wayne Rogers (Capt. “Trapper” John McIntyre) and William Christopher (Father Francis Mulcahy).

M*A*S*H executive producers Gene Reynolds and Burt Metcalfe also appear in new interviews, alongside archival Q&As with writer/producer Larry Gelbart and cast members Larry Linville (Maj. Frank Burns), Harry Morgan (Col. Sherman T. Potter), McLean Stevenson (Lt. Col. Henry Blake) and David Ogden Stiers (Maj. Charles Emerson Winchester III).

TVLine got eyes on the wonderfully thorough and incredibly moving, sometimes highly emotional special, then hopped on the phone with its executive producers, John Scheinfeld and Andy Kaplan, to discuss how it all came together… for Fox, and not CBS (where M*A*S*H originally aired).

TVLINE | At the time of M*A*S*H’s 50th anniversary in September 2022, Maude, The Waltons and The Bob Newhart Show also all turned 50 — and none of them got proper TV specials. Was there a business reason that CBS didn’t do something for M*A*S*H?
JOHN SCHEINFELD | Well, you know, it’s an interesting landscape we’re working in now. Everyone is chasing the younger viewers and sometimes when they’re faced with what they would call “legacy programming,” it’s not something they always jump at.

TVLINE | In my book, you can’t go wrong betting on nostalgia. 
SCHEINFELD | Well, I’m with you and that’s exactly what this [special] is. But the other thing — and Andy and I have talked about this a lot — is that M*A*S*H is multigenerational, it’s not just fixed in the time when it was on the air. It has really never been off the air since 1983, and new generations keep rediscovering it. So there is a nostalgic element, but for several generations, not just the older viewers.
ANDY KAPLAN | But for all those reasons, we were so thrilled that Fox jumped in to do this. To get a special like this in a great time slot on a broadcast network is becoming a much harder thing to do.

TVLINE | You have a lot of original interviews for this special, but as far as archival material, was there any one great “find” for you?
SCHEINFELD | The interesting thing about M*A*S*H is that so much of the behind-the-scenes stuff has come out on various DVD releases over the years. But there were several pieces that we found that excited us.

One was the “act breaks” where we had some of the stars saying, “Coming up next on M*A*S*H….” We thought was really kind of cute and clever, and we were glad we found those. They were buried in the vault at 20th [Century Fox] TV.

And then we tracked down this TV reporter from the Quad Cities who had been on the set on the last day of M*A*S*H shooting back in 1983, and he was there with a crew and shot a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff. You see at the end, Burt Metcalfe, the director and executive producer, says, “That’s a wrap!” and everybody’s hugging…. It was the very last shot of the 11 seasons of M*A*S*H, and then there was a press conference, with Harry and Loretta and Alan and Mike and Bill Christopher all [taking questions]. That’s new footage that we were excited to find.

TVLINE | I was going to ask about the context of that press conference, timing-wise.
SCHEINFELD | It was one of those interesting moments for an actor. Literally, they had done the last shot of an episode called “As Time Goes By,” which wasn’t the last episode to air but it was the last episode to be shot. After Burt Metcalfe said, “That’s a wrap!,” before too long the PR people at Fox are wrangling all the actors and they took them into the commissary on the 20th Century Fox lot—

TVLINE | Oh, so it was an impromptu press conference?
SCHEINFELD | Yes. And all the press is there because they had been there on the set to witness the last shot of this classic series. So, the actors barely had time to process the emotion of the last shot of 11 seasons, and then they’re having to answer all these questions and everything.

TVLINE | I could’ve watched 30 minutes of the press conference alone, because you knew it was a special moment in TV history — just that press conference.
SCHEINFELD | It really was.

I’ll give you some of the background of how we came to be here. When I first started in the business it was in the scripted world — I worked for studios and production companies, and my mentors, who became my friends, were Gene Reynolds and Burt Metcalfe, the two executive producers of M*A*S*H. We’ve stayed friends through the years, and as I got more of a profile in the documentary world I really felt I wanted to do this for them. There hadn’t been a proper documentary on M*A*S*H in many, many years and I thought, “We ought to do this.” And as everyone was getting a little bit older, we cobbled some money together and shot interviews with all the living cast members, and those are the interviews you see in the special. And in fact two, Bill Christopher and Wayne Rogers, died the next year, so these are the very last interviews they gave on M*A*S*H.

And then we found archival interviews with Harry Morgan at [Potter’s] desk, David Ogden Stiers backstage, and then Larry Linville and McLean Stevenson had done interviews for a network special about M*A*S*H that aired in 1991, and those were buried in the vault at Fox, and so we were delighted to find those. I wanted everybody represented. But then, Matt, we couldn’t sell it. The next year we actually had sold it to CBS, but it was bought by Les Moonves, and then Les got booted out and the new guy didn’t want to do it, and so every year or so we would trot this out and we couldn’t get anybody to buy it — even in the anniversary years, as you noted.

But then, happily, Fox decided this was the time to do it, and we had all these interviews and we’ve been on a really insane schedule to get this done. But we screened the 251 episodes to pick the best clips and I can’t imagine a better job coming into work every day and laughing at M*A*S*H.

TVLINE | You mentioned the McLean Stevenson footage, and if I had any one reason to schedule this interview with you guys, it was to ask: Why does he conspicuously appear in a golf cart?
SCHEINFELD | [Laughs] That’s very funny. You’ve been around this business long enough, you’ve seen all kinds of things and how shows get made. It’s all about choices. What are you going to do? How are you going to do it? In 1991, CBS aired a tribute to M*A*S*H and the guy who did it went out and shot interviews with all the cast members and he made the choice to do it where he could get them. So, Larry Linville was in his backyard, and McLean was on a golf cart at the Calabasas Country Club. And somehow it answers the question, “What happened to McLean Stevenson after M*A*S*H?”

TVLINE | Speaking of which, I appreciated the actors’ candor. As a fan of M*A*S*H, I had my assumptions about why people left, but the interviews here really do recontextualize, for me at least, why Wayne Rogers left, why McLean Stevenson left — and that he had regrets, ultimately — why Gary Burghoff left…..
SCHEINFELD | It’s interesting, we didn’t want to do a straight-ahead “history of M*A*S*H.” Our concept was “M*A*S*H as seen through the eyes of the people who made it,” and it’s the comings and goings of the cast members that is our narrative throughline here. And one of the things that I love most about my job is doing these interviews and creating an environment in which they feel comfortable telling the truth and being candid, so we felt the same thing. It was so nice that they all were very candid about that, because you know you don’t know sometimes why somebody left, and here you get a sense of regret or a sense of explanation. Even Gary was very candid about how he was going through some tough things in life.

TVLINE | Gary, I thought, exhibited the most candor, because you can tell he clearly enjoyed working with McLean Stevenson to no end, and yet on the flip side he says he “hated” the Klinger character at the start. I was like, “Oh, wow. This shiny, happy special just got real.”
SCHEINFELD | Well, we try to take a deep dive on these things, so it isn’t just, “Oh, everything is wonderful.” Our challenge was to take all of these candid responses and then find the absolute best clips to illustrate what they were saying, and that’s what we spent a lot of time doing — just making sure that it’s exactly the right thing that we wanted to say that would compliment what they had said.

TVLINE | This special zeroes in on a handful of specific, “big” episodes — such as when Hawkeye’s visiting journalist friend dies, and we get that scene where Alan Alda will make people cry all over again. How did you decide which episodes to highlight?
SCHEINFELD | In the interviews with all the actors, I asked them, “What are your favorite episodes and why?” They each had their own, two, three, four, sometimes five, and we kind of took those as the starting point. But then we looked to fan sites and what they look at as their favorite episodes, and then Gene Reynolds and Burt Metcalfe had their own favorites, and so it was a combination of all those things. And then there were some that I had remembered seeing and thinking they were terrific, and so that’s really what the choice was. But mostly I would say it came from the actors themselves. They had done 251 episodes and these were the ones that, for various reasons, stood out to them.

TVLINE | In all the talk of the series finale, we don’t a clip of the Hawkeye/”chicken” scene. Was it a little too dramatic, a little too scary in tone? 
SCHEINFELD | No, I think what it was we had a limited amount of time to deal with [the series finale] and we felt that that story needed a lot of setup. It’s like, “Well, what does that mean, and why is he talking about a chicken?” and all of that. We felt that with most of these we would just set up the story and that hopefully people are going to want to go watch that episode again, because it’s so spectacular. But that’s why, it was just context.

TVLINE | Lastly — and I’m prepared to be disappointed, since I know the logistical realities of such projects — when you brought the surviving cast in for the new interviews, did anybody get to bump into one another? 
SCHEINFELD | What we did is we shot two days here in L.A., and Wayne and Jamie and Burt and Gene were all here the same day. It was kind of a love-fest, lots of hugging, lots of memories and all of that. And then we shot three in New York — Alan, Loretta and Gary — all in one day, but they all had busy schedules so they came in on time and they did not cross paths.

The thing I would say — and it made me feel good as a fan of the show, and I know you’re a fan as well, so maybe it’ll make you feel good to know this — is that it genuinely seems to be a family amongst that cast. It wasn’t just, “Oh, we worked together and it’s fine.” There seemed to be a genuine familial family there. and even though it may be a little bit of time since they had seen each other, it’s all hugs and the “so great to see you!” kind of thing and that makes me feel good. Burt actually kind of says it near the end of the show, where he says that people genuinely like those characters but they also seem to understand that the actors all liked each other. And I think that came across in the quality of their work.

Watch M*A*S*H: The Comedy That Changed Television on Monday, Jan. 1 at 8/7c, on Fox. The special also streams next day on Hulu, Fox.com, On Demand and on Tubi.