The series kept experimenting and shifting the line between comedy and tragedy. The characters drank hard and there were many subplots about soldiers, doctors, and nurses self-medicating to numb the pain of facing horror every day; season 3’s “The Consultant” introduces Hawkeye and his original sidekick Trapper John (Wayne Rogers) to a sort of Ghost of Boozing Future in the form of a veteran Army doctor who didn’t drink during World War I, drank only after the end of the workday during World War II, and now drinks all the time in Korea. “I’m suffering from one of the three sure signs of age,” he tells Hawkeye, who judges him harshly. “Bit of a spread, gray hair, feet of clay. I wish you better luck on your third war.” Blake was eventually replaced by Morgan as Sherman T. Potter, a World War I cavalry veteran and regular Army man, who, unlike Henry, was no pushover, but who also came to appreciate the need for Hawkeye’s pranks and quips amid the theater of war. Morgan’s innate, unflappable dignity in the role would come to define the show as much as Hawkeye’s shift from womanizing cad to liberal crusader. There were many stories in which the loss of physical ability became a metaphor for the realization that dreams can’t always come true and you unfortunately have to accept it: Among the better examples are season 4’s “Smilin’ Jack,” about a hotshot chopper pilot who’s on track to set a service record when he’s grounded by a diabetes diagnosis, and season 5’s “End Run,” which finds Radar comforting a college football star whose leg has to be amputated.
Psychology, and the value of psychotherapy, became increasingly important as the show wore on, especially in stories that involved Major Sidney Freedman (Allan Arbus). In season 6’s “War of Nerves,” he stays at the 4077th to heal physical wounds and ends up setting up a makeshift practice in a tent and offering all of the major characters a chance to talk about their problems; nearly everyone initially resists but almost immediately gives in. Among other things, he helps chief nurse Margaret Houlihan (Loretta Swit) and recently arrived surgeon Charles Emerson Winchester III (David Ogden Stiers) realize that they bicker all the time because they have feelings for each other. Sidney is at the heart of the series finale’s most heart-wrenching subplot, helping Hawkeye push past denial and realize that a chicken a woman strangled so as not to reveal a busload of refugees’ position to the enemy was not a chicken after all but her own baby.
The show took risks with form as well as content, growing bolder by the season. You could see harbingers of this restlessness in the season 1 finale, “Showtime,” which crosscuts a performance by a visiting USO show with Henry Blake’s waiting for word on whether his wife has given birth back home; the staccato editing (hard-cutting between cornball USO comedy and musical performances and the mundane daily life of the camp) evokes Bob Fosse’s innovative Cabaret, which had come out eighteen months earlier. The show did many episodes with de facto voice-overs (in the form of letters being written or read; season 4’s “Dear Ma,” from Radar’s point of view, is the sweetest), as well as stories told from the perspectives of minor characters or visitors to the camp (the peak was season 7’s “Point of View,” where the camera becomes the first-person representation of what a wounded soldier sees). Season 4 ended with “The Interview,” an oft-imitated episode presented as a black-and-white news documentary.
The only aspect of M*A*S*H that hasn’t aged well is its portrait of women. It was openly if benignly sexist in its early years, though not as brutally as Altman’s film (where Trapper John, played by Elliott Gould, pleads with Henry to “give me at least one nurse who knows how to work in close without getting her tits in my way”). But there were never any major recurring female characters except for Margaret, who spent the series’ early years as a cartoonish foil besotted with Larry Linville’s craven Major Frank Burns; she would mature over time and become Hawkeye’s ally (and occasionally more than that), though their accord took away most of the humor associated with a character once known as “Hot Lips.” For the most part, the other nurses were depicted as a Greek chorus for the men in the foreground, as emblems of domesticity or motherly/big sisterly nurturing during off-hours, and sexual prizes for Hawkeye. They were so neglected that whenever they appeared, the show worked their names into the dialogue so that we could tell them apart. The series doesn’t deserve to be called misogynistic, as the nurses were treated with affection; it was homosocial (meaning it was concerned with male values in a male world). There’s truth to the perception that in later years it became one of the most aggressively feminist series on network TV, thanks mainly to Alda’s influence behind the scenes. His name became a synonym for “sensitive New Age man,” but Hawkeye’s nonstop sexual remarks around women undercut this perception. In terms of representation, M*A*S*H never quite put its money where its feminist mouth was.
But, judged purely as an extended piece of comic storytelling, the show was truly bold, and it grew more audacious by the season. As executive producer, Alda transformed M*A*S*H from a comedy with serious moments to a drama that paused for wisecracks. The more anarchic early years of Gelbart and Reynolds, or even the middle seasons with head writers Ken Levine and David Isaacs, were better and more well-rounded versions of the show—and ones that had no problem going very grim when the occasion called for it. But despite fans’ gripes about the more virtuous, late-’70s incarnations of Hawkeye, B.J., and Hot Lips, those later seasons gave M*A*S*H an added weight that made “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen” feel less like a sitcom finale than a wake for a revered institution.
The finale’s size—the length of five episodes spliced together—reinforced that feeling, as did the somber tone. Hawkeye has landed in an Army mental hospital after a nervous breakdown, and over the course of the first hour or so, Sidney Freedman helps him come to grips with what that chicken really was. The snobbish Winchester (a more impressive foil for Hawkeye and B.J. than Burns had been) befriends a surrendering unit of Chinese musicians, whom he teaches to play his beloved Mozart, only to be devastated when they’re killed after leaving his care. Even perennially upbeat Father Mulcahy (William Christopher) doesn’t seem likely to leave the war unscathed: An injury suffered during an act of heroism slowly robs him of his hearing.
The final moments present Hawkeye and B.J. as the paragons of tender ’70s masculinity that they had become. “I want you to know how much you meant to me,” Hawkeye tells B.J. “I can’t imagine what this place would have been like if I hadn’t found you here,” B.J. replies, fighting back tears. B.J.’s refusal to admit that this would be the last time he and Hawkeye would see each other also functioned as a commentary on how hard it can be for fans to let go of their favorite shows, and vice versa, and of course the final image would be the message B.J. spelled out in rocks for his best friend to read as his chopper left the 4077th forever:
“GOODBYE.”
—AS & MZS
Hill Street Blues (NBC, 1981–1987) Total score: 104
For a show that’s one of the most groundbreaking and influential in TV history, there actually aren’t a lot of elements of Hill Street Blues that, on their own, were all that original. The serialized structure was borrowed from daytime soaps. The black comedy and sense of urban decay were straight out of ’70s cop movies. The chaotic look of the project (with desaturated colors, handheld photography, and abrupt cuts from scene to scene) came from documentaries. The roving camera that pushed in and out of crowds of characters owed a lot to the ensemble-driven films of Robert Altman (MASH, Nashville). Daniel J. Travanti’s precinct captain Frank Furillo was a blend of righteous but sensitive ’70s heroes like Frank Serpico and Hawkeye Pierce. And so on.
Then again, you could say the same thing about Citizen Kane, whose impact on what movies could aspire to look and sound like was as far-reaching as Hill Street’s impact has been on TV drama. In both cases, the pieces were old, but put together in a way that no one had thought to try before. Not all cop shows before Hill Street were pablum. You might have expected sophisticated characters or plotting or even a rich visual palette from many of
them, including the ones written in the ’70s by Hill Street creators Steven Bochco (Columbo, Delvecchio) and Michael Kozoll (Kojak, Quincy, M.E.), or directed in the ’60s by the series’ first director, Robert Butler (The Untouchables, The Fugitive). But a police drama that was adventurous morally, visually, and narratively, all at the same time, was unheard of. The rest of the business raced to follow in the show’s footsteps.
Hill Street Blues plunged the audience into the poorest, filthiest, most crime-ridden precinct of an unnamed Midwestern city, not even bothering to differentiate the major players from the extras at first. The first episode opens with the soon-to-be-customary roll call by philosophical Sergeant Phil Esterhaus (Michael Conrad), which orients the viewer less to upcoming plots than to the general sense of chaos and decay. At one point, he reads a department memo “concerning the alleged carrying of bizarre and unauthorized weapons by the officers of this precinct,” which leads to every actor onscreen producing an astonishing collection of pistols, switchblades, nunchakus, and other deadly instruments per Esterhaus’s request, then immediately retrieving them all as they head out to deal with the junkies, perverts, and gang members who consume so much of their beat. They are the police force as unruly mob, barely kept in control by Esterhaus, who has to yell at them at the end of each roll call, “Hey! Let’s be careful out there.” And as we see the streets they have to patrol, we come to understand how they got this way, or why undercover cop Mick Belker (Bruce Weitz) has gone feral to the point where Furillo has to admonish him not to bite a detainee who has gone wild and beaten up a half dozen uniformed officers. (“Two years ago, I bit off a nose,” Belker laments. “One lousy nose! I’m branded for life here: Belker the Biter!”)
Bochco and Kozoll had begun referring to the series as “Cop Soap,” but this was a dark, challenging sort of soap opera, and one that took a while for audiences to get used to. NBC at the time was run by Fred Silverman, who had presided over CBS during the early ’70s golden age of All in the Family and M*A*S*H, then turned ABC into a powerhouse with Happy Days, Charlie’s Angels, and The Love Boat. His NBC tenure was for the most part an utter catastrophe in which he green-lit several contenders for the title of Worst TV Show Ever Made, including Supertrain (which attempted to translate the Love Boat formula to a luxury… train?) and Pink Lady and Jeff (a variety show whose two main stars spoke virtually no English). But Silverman hadn’t completely lost his CBS sensibilities, and one of his last acts before leaving NBC was to renew the dismally rated Hill Street, sending Bochco a note that read, “Dear Steve, You’re going to sweep the Emmys and go on to be a big hit. Fred.” (He was mostly right: Hill Street got a record twenty-one Emmy nominations that first year, winning eight of them, and ran seven seasons, but only grew into a midsized success.)
Though it was breaking from previous formula, Hill Street quickly developed a formula of its own: a couple of stories to be resolved in the space of each episode, one or two others that might be spaced out over three or four, and some concluding thoughts after Furillo goes home to his clandestine love affair with public defender Joyce Davenport (Veronica Hamel). But the formula was elastic enough to allow ridiculously big characters like fascistic SWAT commander Howard Hunter (James B. Sikking) to interact with more human-scaled ones like Furillo or liberal detective Henry Goldblume (Joe Spano), and jump from the farce of uniformed patrolmen Bobby Hill and Andy Renko (Michael Warren and Charles Haid) trying to get a live bull out of a fifth-floor tenement apartment to the drama of Furillo inadvertently driving a corrupt precinct captain to suicide by ruling against him in a Board of Rights hearing.
Though many of its creative descendants—including other shows created by Bochco and/or Hill Street writers David Milch (NYPD Blue, Deadwood), Dick Wolf (Law & Order), and Anthony Yerkovich (Miami Vice)—inspire debates among their fans about the best episode, that rarely happens with Hill Street. That’s partly because there’s an obvious answer: the third-season premiere, “Trial by Fury,” Milch’s debut screenplay, in which the rape and murder of a nun pushes the virtuous Furillo to a breaking point where he’s willing to use the threat of mob justice to coerce a confession from one of the perpetrators, then sends him to confession afterward to deal with the guilt. But it’s also because the show had such a sprawling narrative, with wild shifts in tone and focus, that few installments stand out as appreciably better than the rest. Hill Street Blues was bigger than any one episode, one character, one stylistic device. It put all those familiar puzzle pieces together to form something so much greater than the sum of its individual parts that it forever changed the way TV dramas were built.
—AS
The Shield (FX, 2002–2008) Total score: 102
Television shows are living, breathing organisms that quickly evolve past whatever designs their creators originally had for them. One actor might leave abruptly, or another might turn out to be more talented (and more in need of screen time) than anyone expected, or a story designed to last two seasons might exhaust itself in a quarter of that time.
Because of that, endings in TV are much harder than beginnings. A show can be propped up for commercial reasons long after it’s creatively finished, and thus give you something like Dexter Morgan: Lumberjack at the end for lack of any good remaining ideas. Or a conclusion hatched in season 1 or 2 may no longer apply to where the characters are in season 8 (see How I Met Your Mother later in this book). Or a creator may simply have something very different in mind from what the fans were expecting, which leads to Tony Soprano eating onion rings, or the explanation for the Lost sideways universe, or Larry David lecturing his audience on what terrible people the Seinfeld gang of four were.
So it’s rare to find a completely satisfying end to a truly great show. Even in this new golden age of television, the most common feeling at a series’ end is simply relief that the people in charge didn’t screw it up.
But then there is The Shield, whose ending was so powerful, so unflinching, and so very much a culmination of the entire series that it retroactively made everything that came before it better. Without that finale, The Shield is still a great show. With it, it’s one for the ages.
Born of FX’s desire to position itself as a basic-cable version of HBO, and creator Shawn Ryan’s fondness to apply the lessons of the LAPD Rampart scandal to the formula of gritty ’90s cop dramas like NYPD Blue and Homicide, The Shield took place in one of LA’s worst police districts, where the only men apparently preventing full-scale gang anarchy are Detective Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) and the members of his strike team. Some colleagues viewed him as a hero, while his new boss David Aceveda (Benito Martinez) saw him as “Al Capone with a badge.” Mackey shrugged off all labels, telling a pedophile kidnapper, “Good cop and bad cop left for the day. I’m a different kind of cop.”
Aceveda has assigned Terry Crowley (Reed Diamond from Homicide) to go undercover in the strike team and get the goods on Vic. And just as the series seemed to be setting itself up for a classic battle of wits between a corrupt cop and an honest one, Vic shot Terry in the face during a raid on a drug dealer’s house, leaving himself untouchable, given that his only potential opponents were a calculating politician in Aceveda, precinct joke Dutch Wagenbach (Jay Karnes), and Claudette Wyms (C. C. H. Pounder), a veteran cop wise enough to know what Vic was really about and wiser still to know she’d get nowhere fast chasing him.
Instead, Vic’s greatest enemy over the life of the series turned out to be himself, as he was so caught up in trying to amass a retirement fund, and cover up the many crimes required to do that, that he was perpetually digging himself out of quicksand, temporarily freeing himself while ultimately finding himself in even deeper than before.
Yet even from that starting point with Vic and Terry, The Shield managed to exist in morally gray territory for much of its run. Vic was an unrepentant cop-killer and all-around criminal, but he also had his uses as a cop, and the series was able to function as a high-end police procedural—sometimes involving Dutch a
nd Claudette investigating the city’s most disgusting murders, sometimes with the strike team trying to shut down gang wars—even as it was chronicling Vic and his protégé Shane Vendrell’s (Walton Goggins) descent into lawlessness. Shot guerrilla-style on LA’s east side, by an impressive group of directors including Clark Johnson, Paris Barclay, Scott Brazil, and David Mamet, it looked and felt like no cop show before it.
And it ended like none had. By the final seasons, the need for colorful external villains, like Anthony Anderson as local drug kingpin Antwon Mitchell or Forest Whitaker as unstable Internal Affairs investigator Jon Kavanaugh, vanished as the strike team rotted from within, particularly after Shane murdered fugitive strike teamer Lem (Kenny Johnson) to eliminate any chance of his testifying against the rest of them.
The final season is less a collection of stories than an agonizing endurance test, designed to keep the audience guessing about who would live, who would die, and who might possibly emerge unscathed. In the end, it’s a mix of triumph and tragedy, sometimes for the same character.
Claudette and Dutch are on the verge of busting a new serial killer, but Claudette reveals that she’s close to losing her series-long fight against lupus. Shane goes on the run from the law and murders himself, his young son, and his pregnant wife in a horrifyingly misguided bid to protect his family’s innocence. Vic somehow cons his future employers in the federal government into giving him immunity for every crime we’ve seen him commit, but loses his family, friends, and reputation in the process. He winds up a prisoner of an untraditional form of jail, where he has to report to a tiny cubicle every day to do paperwork assigned by bosses who rightly despise him.
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