MASH's Finale 40th Anniversary Celebrated By Alan Alda

[TMC]

https://screenrant.com/mash-finale-a...0th-alan-alda/

Actor Alan Alda commemorates the 40th anniversary of the MASH series finale, the most-watched TV episode of all time, with a post on social media.

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[TMC]

Why do they not show the final episode of M*A*S*H on TV?

Who is “they?”

TVLand has shown it several times; however they have a different structure than network television or local affiliates. I believe that MeTV tried it but they broke it down to two separate one hour episodes.

Anyway….

1. It’s essentially a M*A*S*H* television movie - To be appreciated it needs to be seen in its entirety and that’s proven difficult to do.
2. For some reason that’s still not clear, there’s not really a point where it can be easily broken down into one hour segments - Despite the producers knowing that fans would want to see it in syndication, they didn’t film the episode/movie in manners that made it easy to break it into two parts and that makes it difficult for syndicators to air it.
3. The series needs to start again following its airing - Assuming that you’re watching the series on a network with a syndication package following the series finale the series itself reboots back to its 1972 beginning with Wayne Rogers, McLean Stevenson and the original cast of characters. That is disconcerting for all but longtime fans and so the series simply airs seasons in any sort of order usually avoiding the series finale.
4. It’s really not that good - Sorry to rain on everyone’s parade, but Hawkeye’s chicken/baby story is overwrought and frankly really sort of disingenuous considering how many deaths that he’d witnessed in the years beforehand. I was stationed in South Korea and I read extensively about the war. It was an extremely brutal conflict, and the time to “break” would have been in the beginning or early on. By the end of the war, so many had seen so much, that his distress rings hollow. Watching the ending episode again, you can it’s Alan Alda grasping for an Emmy, and not an actor telling a revealing tale about their longtime character. It was good forty years ago, not.
5. It costs too much for most networks to air it - MeTV, and to a lesser extent TVLand, advertise primarily the series that they air so they can show whatever want largely whenever they choose to do so. Other networks’ advertising spots are valuable and so they have to program what they and their advertisers believe will bring in the most “eyes”. A two hour series finale of a classic sitcom isn’t likely to be the best use of that time and so it would rarely shown, if at all.

The best place to watch the episode, querent, is the DVD set.

Anything else is butchered or requires that you “wait” for the ending.

[Duster76]

Another bit of nonsense from Joe Mixon. This is a nonissue, METV shows the full movie once or twice a year, Veteran's Day, Memorial Day maybe Independence Day some combination of those holidays.