Rob and Mike are back! And they're traveling back in time to revisit the Pilot in "The Creation of Venus" and watching Les come to terms with his career in "The Impossible Dream."
(Full show notes appear at Hold My Order, Terrible Dresser two days after each episode is released. All audio clips are the properties of their owners/creators and appear in this work of comment and critique under fair use provisions of copyright law.)
Rob's discussion of the ontological difficulties of sitcom "universes" reminded me of one of my TV pet peeves from the late 70s-early 80s. Characters that spin off from a half-hour laugh track sitcom into a hour long drama. Both Lou Grant and Trapper John McIntyre did that. Are M*A*S*H* and "Trapper John, M.D." in the same universe? I assume the version of Trapper John played by Pernell Roberts in the eponymous series was a Korean War vet, but was he in the comedy Korean War, or the serious Korean War?
ReplyDeleteMike: Yes! The shift from a comedy "universe" to a melodrama "universe" is in some ways much more profound than changing the actress who plays your mother. Did post-war Trapper John reminisce about his war days and think "life was a whole lot wackier then"? Of course, the tone of M*A*S*H* itself changed enough over its run that any character might well have looked back and thought, "this war used to be a lot more zany - and shouldn't the Korean War have been over, like 5 years ago?"
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