M*A*S*H cast to reunite on Alan Alda’s podcast
The six living cast members will likely share stories of the co-stars who have died since the show signed off in 1983.
Attention M*A*S*H fans: You won’t want to miss this.
The surviving cast members of the iconic CBS sitcom, which followed the staff of a mobile army surgical hospital during the Korean War, are set to reunite on star Alan Alda’s Clear + Vivid podcast (available on iTunes).
In an interview with Washington-area radio station WTOP, Alda, 82, revealed the reunion was supposed to happen earlier this month, but they had to postpone the recording because Jamie Farr, who played company fixer Max Klinger, nearly lost his home in the California wildfires.
Now that the fires have been contained, he said the cast will be getting together, though he did not say exactly when the podcast episode will be released.
“Loretta Swit and I will be talking from New York, Mike Farrell will be in a studio in L.A., Jamie Farr will be on the phone from his house in Bell Canyon and Gary Burghoff will be on the phone from Northern California.”
Alda added, “It’s the first time all of those people have gotten together in years. Even though we try to have dinner every year, we can’t all make the dinner … It’s going to be a really nice get-together. I want to talk about what we discovered as actors that helped us relate in ways that are necessary in a show like that. These ways we found in connecting are unusual … I’ve been acting a long time and I’ve never seen people do what we did.”
The six living cast members will likely share stories of the co-stars who have died since the show signed off in 1983: Harry Morgan (Col. Potter) in 2011; William Christopher (Father Mulcahy), in 2016, exactly one year after original cast member Wayne Rogers (“Trapper” John McIntyre). Their most recent loss came in March when David Ogden Stiers (Charles Emerson Winchester III) lost a battle with bladder cancer.
Two other original cast members have died in the last 25 years: Larry Linville (Frank Burns) in 2000 and McLean Stevenson (Col. Henry Blake) in 1996.
Alda, who directed and co-wrote the 1983 series finale, “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen” — still the most-watched TV episode in history with more than 100 million viewers — says there’s one silver lining in today’s fractured TV landscape.
“I don’t mind that things are splintered now: that means nobody will kill our record!” Alda joked.
“It’s fun having that record. It was an amazing moment. We didn’t know how popular the show was until the night the last episode was playing. We were on our way to a restaurant to celebrate while the country was watching the show and suddenly we realized that the streets were practically empty. We said, ‘Oh my God, they’re all home watching the show!’”
