Whether it’s a book, a film, or a television show, the characters of each individual medium are an essential part of storytelling. Particularly where it concerns television.
When writing television, as we’ve discussed in the ‘story’ article, the setup for a TV show is everything, and the characters are part of that setup, the ‘home base’ that the audience returns to every week. The characters are the people that the audience gets to know, who are at the center of each episode and individual adventure, with their own quirks and arcs that make sense. At the end of the day, characters are the part of the setup most responsible for holding an audience’s investment, the chief reason that viewers sit through bad episodes in order to get to the good ones. It is the responsibility of the main characters to keep an audience’s attention, making each episode, even the bad ones, passable, or memorable.
After all, the audience will likely not stick with it if they should happen to think the Eight Deadly Words:
“I don’t care what happens to these people.”
See, while it’s important to develop good characters in every form of storytelling, it is perhaps the most crucial to get them right on television. Because once those eight words are said, it doesn’t matter how gripping, how funny, or how compelling the stories are: the audience will leave.
While a feature-length movie can get away with blander characters by distracting an audience with interesting visuals or a unique storyline, television rarely has that ability. With a smaller budget and time to get a story across, television, by necessity, is character-based, involving a small number of cast members that the audience knows that appear in multiple episodes. Thanks to this, characters written for television have to be multifaceted: flexible in order to be interesting to watch in multiple stories and scenarios, with the ability to show growth as the show progresses.
This can be a tall order. As a result, writing for characters on television can be pretty difficult, with many writers struggling to find a balance between entertainment value, and relatability.
The question of the hour is: does the cast of M*A*S*H manage to pull that off?
As you probably guessed, that’s the question we’re going to be taking a look at today, starting with the main surgeon: Captain Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce. (Alan Alda)
Hawkeye is the Chief Surgeon of the 4077th, the (sometimes Broken) Ace, and an Actual Pacifist hailing from Crabapple Cove, Maine. Hawkeye is a lot of things: a boisterous jokester, a skilled surgeon, a Determinator…and a Stepford Snarker, a Shell-Shocked Veteran, and a Sad Clown. He’s a charming, charismatic, over-the-top Trickster who truly is absurd…because he has to be.
Hawkeye is only here because he has to be. He wants to be far away from this war, and it’s very clear he’s only here because he’s been drafted, forced into serving a country that, to his eyes, is sending boys off to get shot up over a ‘police action’. He’s a pacifist, a doctor, a healer, who wants no part of this war and these deaths. It is this element, chiefly, that makes Hawkeye such a good and interesting character.
One of the rare Dynamic characters of sitcoms of the ‘70s, originally, Hawkeye wasn’t necessarily supposed to be the main character. He was Chief Surgeon, and the source of most of the jokes, but he was intended to be part of a duo with Trapper McIntyre. In the original novel, Hawkeye was an entirely different character, and not the breakout he became. However, as the first season of the show wore on, it became clear that Alan Alda’s portrayal of the good doctor was becoming the ‘face’ of the show, and for nearly eleven years, Hawkeye took center stage as the heart and mind of the show, providing filibusters and comedy alike.
And in all honesty, he’s an odd choice to head up this cast.
Like I said, he’s a pacifist, and, ironically, he can be really belligerent about it. He doesn’t want to be here. In all honesty, Hawkeye can be downright unlikeable at times. He can be arrogant, rude, self-centered, self-righteous, and mean-spirited to some people. He has a bit of a temper. He’s an alcoholic. He’s suffered more breakdowns than enzymes have.
All of those things can make Hawkeye really hard to like at times. And that’s why he works so well as a protagonist.
See, Hawkeye is all of those things, but he is also something else: a Dynamic character.
All of Hawkeye’s faults are on display, more and more obvious as the show goes on. Fitting with the genre, in the early years of M*A*S*H, he’s just a prankster, a jokester, a womanizing surgeon with great skills and a sharp wit and a hatred for all-things military. But as the show grew more serious, starting with the episode Sometimes You Hear the Bullet, the show, and Hawkeye himself, began to change.
After Hawkeye watches his friend die on his operating table, the Cerberus Syndrome that set in with the show in general took its toll on Hawkeye. The war takes a lot out of him, his morale and sanity being casualties of the constant wear and tear of meatball surgery.
And throughout it all, he refuses to crack under it.
“Look Colonel, I’ll heal their wounds, treat their wounds, bind their wounds, but I will not inflict their wounds.”
Hawkeye remains a pacifist to the end, refusing to carry a gun, to harm another human, to take a life, choosing to spend his time and sanity repairing the damage already done. He’s a dedicated doctor, and he values human life, all human life, no matter what side of the conflict it’s on. He hates everything army, and all he wants is to go home. In the end, he’s a nice guy, but one with a lot of rough edges. He can be tough to like, but he’s easy to love as a protagonist for a show, a character the audience feels for, intently, even when he’s doing things that we don’t agree with, like performing an unnecessary surgery for a scheme. But despite the fact that Hawkeye is consistently all of these things, he’s also consistently changing. The war changes him the way it changes everyone, and by the end, Hawkeye is a man with serious problems, who has had one friend leave without saying goodbye, a well-liked commanding officer who was killed going home, countless patients die on the table, and nearly had his other best friend leave, again, without saying goodbye. He’s lost people. It’s no small wonder that the finale opener sees him in a psychiatric hospital, uncovering repressed memories of a woman who smothered her baby in order to hide from an enemy patrol…under his unknowing orders to keep quiet.
Hawkeye begins the show as a bright, sarcastic, skilled doctor with many, many problems, and ends it, much the same way…but older, damaged, more depressed and neurotic than when he came, but kinder, too, and wiser, and more compassionate. He’s an example of what war does, and what people with those experiences go through, and because of that, the show rides on his shoulders. He is the viewpoint character, the flawed, scared man who is saving lives, and who’d rather be anywhere else. As a result, he’s wonderfully effective as the main character, the mainstay of the 4077th, the man who has seen everything, and doesn’t want to, and indeed, can’t bear to see anymore, and covered it all up with a joke.
And as a result, the audience related to him. Hawkeye was gripping, a passionate man with intense convictions and emotions for the audience to care about, even if they didn’t agree with him. We wanted him to make it, to be okay in the end. He wasn’t perfect, but he was understandable, and as much as he was incredibly entertaining, he was incredibly human, too. And in the end, he did make it home, and even got that final goodbye. Like all the characters, Hawkeye left Korea a changed man, and as much as we may have regretted saying goodbye to these characters, Hawkeye’s final farewell rang a little more bittersweet than the rest.
But he wasn’t alone, even in the position of ‘main leads’. In the early seasons, he shared the spotlight with another skilled surgeon and captain: John “Trapper” McIntyre.
(Join us next time for Part 2: Trapper McIntyre, Henry Blake, and more!)
Twentieth Century Fun With Film 