#brian dennehy

Hi, MASHies <3

It sucks that, for a long time now, I’ve seemed to post here only when I have news of someone from MASH dying. I would like to change that, because I still love MASH so much and think of it often. The urgency of having to commemorate these deaths should not preclude happier, gentler, more leisurely fan talk.

But, ugh of course, people have indeed died and it would be mean not to mention it. GREAT people—including Brian Dennehy, one of our treasured character actors, who breezed in for a brief appearance in season 5. He’s one of those people who worked so much during that era, it seemed there was hardly anything he wasn’t in. I absolutely love actors like that.

Gene Reynolds, too, one of the very architects of the show who poured his life into it, passed earlier this year before all the pandemic crap went down. I wrote in more detail about Gene here…

Especially, though, I want to give a sendoff to Timothy Brown, season 1’s Spearchucker Jones and one of a very few actors to appear in both the TV series and the movie (though in different roles). He died last month at age 82, reportedly due to complications from dementia.

As I’ve said before, there’s an unfortunate stain on this character—his racist nickname caused him to be quietly cut loose after five episodes. Though I don’t fault MASH for this decision, I’ve always thought it a shame for this to happen to Brown, a charismatic, handsome actor who could have done much for the series. As a former football player and a singer, he was unusually versatile. A comedy like MASH might have benefited from his talents, especially as it got heavier later on; the absence of Black main characters throughout most of the series also fails to reflect the actual diversity of most Army corps. One thing the frequently-maligned early seasons did better than the later ones was to include this young doctor, along with Odessa Cleveland’s excellent Nurse Ginger.

What we do get of Doctor Jones, we relish: team spirit, surgical competence (he was the only brain surgeon!), and drowsy smiles. May he rest in peace.