#that 70s show

At its inception, MASH happened twenty years in the past; now, this roughly 45-year-old show is happening 65 years in the past. A gap this size speaks to nostalgia more than history. MASH was neither the first series nor the last to use this gimmick—as it happens, adults’ feelings for their youth are extremely powerful. “Happy Days” is the salient example of a beloved sitcom that reminded adult viewers of their teens, but the formula would be just as successful for semi-serious fare like “The Wonder Years” and “Freaks and Geeks.” Even kids who never lived it could get into the odd customs of their parents’ generation. Consider “That ‘70s Show,” which ran for eight seasons. By the way, where’s today’s sitcom set in 1998, about college kids who share a Dell computer and say talk to the hand? I’m ready. I want it.

The ‘50s artifacts in MASH are pleasing to look at, some shabby (battered ammunition boxes), some shiny (enamel cups, glass jars of blood for the IV). Burns loves listening to Glenn Miller; Klinger copies a dress from a Rita Hayworth movie; Hawkeye calls General Barker “dad.” Production design is fairly faithful to the era, and the army setting with its bare-bones equipment also provides leeway. Still, people have Seventies hair and makeup and faces and bodies. Especially as the series moves into its late seasons and Korea is no longer twenty years ago but thirty, we begin to lose the sense of time altogether. MASH is its own time and place, as if visited via a parallel-universe portal.

To add yet another dimension, here in our age the Seventies is now long enough ago that it’s attained “history” status. Highbrow TV projects like “The Deuce” and “Mindhunter” can treat the era with reverence, and we are at a point where MASH the series is less a good little comedy than a substantive cultural document. It survives! Moreover, as a subject of study today, it’s far more interesting than it was as a TV show in 1972: new layers of MASH’s relevance are presenting themselves at a fast rate. There’s a lesson here, and my mystic side is dying to believe it’s proof that time is immaterial.

But maybe it’s simpler than that, just something about everything coming back into style sooner or later.

Straight facts