Ron Howard's Only M*A*S*H Episode Set The Tone For The Rest Of The Show
When Larry Gelbart brought "M*A*S*H" to television, he had dauntingly spacious shoes to fill. Robert Altman's 1970 film, based on a novel by Richard Hooker, was a New Hollywood sensation that mined the Korean War (an obvious Vietnam substitute) for edgy, hard R-rated laughs. It was the third-highest-grossing movie of the year and racked up five Academy Award nominations (including one for Best Picture). Matching the quality of the film was challenging enough. The biggest problem facing Gelbart was retaining the ribald tone, a tall order considering network television's conservative content standards in the early 1970s.
Gelbart's solution was to sand down the sharp misogynistic edges of the characters and embrace a more humanistic gallows sense of humor. The small-screen version of the 4077th was certainly mischievous, but they weren't mean-spirited. They would've never pulled the humiliating shower prank on Hot Lips from the film. Yes, there were extreme personality clashes, but Alan Alda's Hawkeye and Wayne Rogers' Trapper John didn't outright despise Larry Linville's Frank Burns.
This sensibility was vital to the show's initial success and longevity. If these people harbored hatred for one another, there'd be fewer notes for the writers to play. And when it came to addressing the inescapably awful reality of war into which these characters had been plunged, Gelbart and his writers addressed it in a matter-of-fact but not hopeless fashion. Life still had to have meaning for the members of the 4077th; there had to be a reason to get out of bed and try to mend wounded soldiers every day.
It's a tonal balance Gelbart learned how to strike in the first season in an episode featuring Andy Griffith's television son.
Opie Taylor goes to war
American television viewers spent most of the 1960s getting to know and love the residents of Mayberry, North Carolina, on "The Andy Griffith Show." In doing so, they'd watched Ron Howard, as Opie Taylor, grow from a precocious six-year-old to a 14-year-old adolescent. For many, he was considered precious cargo.
Howard was still a teenager when he played a young marine on the 17th episode of "M*A*S*H" titled "Sometimes You Hear the Bullet." Too young, it turns out. After removing the soldier's appendix, Hawkeye discovers that he's only 15 years old. The boy tells Hawkeye that he faked his age so that he could fight in the war and, hopefully, impress his ex-girlfriend. Though Hawkeye considers this a lousy reason to enlist, it doesn't look like he's going to report the young man to his superiors.
Hawkeye changes his mind when his old buddy Tommy Gillis (James T. Callahan), a journalist writing a book about front-line combat, is rushed into the operating room with a severe bullet wound. After he dies during surgery, a devastated Hawkeye, hoping to save the life of the misguided marine, blows the kid's cover. He's going home, and he's none too happy about it.
Many consider "Sometimes You Hear the Bullet" to be the first "M*A*S*H" episode to successfully mix laughs with the horrors of war. Interestingly, had the episode made it to air as originally written, Howard wouldn't have been in it at all.
An episode that captures the bittersweet brilliance of M*A*S*H
In an interview for Ed Solomonson and Mark O'Neill's "TV's M*A*S*H: The Ultimate Guide Book," Gelbart agreed that "Sometimes You Hear the Bullet" was pivotal to helping the writers find the show's tone. But he also noted that the script was illustrative of how television writing works.
At the outset, the episode dealt primarily with Gillis' death and how it impacts Hawkeye. But Gelbart and producer Gene Reynolds felt the story needed a little more depth. As he told Solomonson, "Gene and I felt the show should be more than about 'just dying.' Something positive should result from the man's death."
The duo had no interest in devising a "Pollyanna" ending, but they did believe inserting Howard's marine character could keep the episode from feeling morose. Per Gelbart:
"That character was woven into the re-write so that when Tommy dies, Hawkeye can send the kid home by betraying him, the kid thinking he's betraying him, so Tommy's death wasn't in vain. Because if his death was in vain, maybe the whole war was in vain. Maybe everybody died for nothing. It's a painless sort of message. I don't like messages that either telegraph themselves or are underlined or in Italics or you nudge the audience 'Get it?'"
"Sometimes You Hear the Bullet" ends on a bittersweet note, with Hawkeye presenting Howard's marine with a Purple Heart that was intended for Burns (who'd put in for the medal after throwing his back out while dancing with Hot Lips). It's a lovely payoff to the story's silliest element, and it's a dynamic the "M*A*S*H" writers would nail many times throughout the series' 11-season run.