The original post: /r/television by /u/Sirwired on 2025-04-13 22:00:18.
I’ve been meaning to get around to it, and now I’m finally watching M*A*S*H more than just a scattered episode here and there. The show is very good (if a product of its time; it’s super-sexist… maybe this changes as time goes on? Still in Season 1… as an episodic sitcom with no ongoing story-line, it’s tough to binge-watch.)
Anyway, Loretta Swit (Margaret Houlihan) and Larry Linville (Frank Burns) have, by far, the hardest jobs on the cast. Unlikable hypocritical kill-joys, and the butt of a huge number of the jokes. (Swit has it especially bad, since it’s implied her character has slept her way to her current rank, though at least they portray her as a competent nurse.) It can’t have been easy to keep that up, week after week, season after season, getting the worst parts of every script, but they pull it off.
I’m not saying Alan Alda’s role was easy, but it had to have been a lot more fun to play the lovable rogue who is also a great doctor, as opposed to the shrill harpy, or incompetent, uptight, buffoon.
(And it did their careers no favors either; neither of them went on to significant work after their time on M*A*S*H was over. Despite them being, by all reports, very easy to work with, they got too associated with their personas on the show, and understandably they didn’t want to take on a similar role again. They weren’t unemployed, but didn’t exactly light up Hollywood either.)
EDIT: Dammit, I put two 't’s on Loretta Swit’s last name… can’t edit the title.