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captainsblogI kinda struggled with how to distinguish this one from the second day of this extravaganza, where I nominated Nurse Jackie as a show more people should be watching. The subtlety in this question seems to suggest something with a broader appeal, a greater social significance, perhaps with less anti-social behavior than Jacks displays around her pill-o-matic (as well as the machine that temporary replaced him).
So naturally, I finally get to bring up Doctor Who.
For years, people told ME I should be watching this. The long history to catch up on, the misunderstanding of some of the canonical rules, the Veddy Britishism of it all kept me away. Once I plunged, though, I plunged deep. My counting only goes from 9 to 11 with slight tastes of one or two earlier ones, but that's what the next five months can be for, huh.
Who is one of those "you get it or you don't" things, at least among viewers on this side of the pond. I don't think anybody ever yawns, looks at their channel guide, and says, Oh, something called 'Vincent and the Doctor' on BBC America; I think I'll give that a try.
They should. And it shouldn't take a Hollywood adaptation with Johnny Depp to do it, as is rumoured. (I can hear the Oompa Loompa song already- Timey, wimey, wibbly wob, I flew my TARDIS into a mob....)
Despite dozens of hands in the production over the decades, this programme has achieved a cultural iconity in the UK that I doubt anything here can match. (That'd make for a good dissertation someday, no?;) That alone makes it worthy of this distinction on my list.
Day 09 - Best scene ever
Nothing even close. The scene after Lt. Colonel Henry Blake's sendoff at the end of Season Three of MASH:
In his memoir about writing for (mostly) television titled Laughing Matters, the creator of this scene, the now departed Larry Gelbart, gave some incredible insight into what was happening in the writers' room and on the set to accomplish this memorable minute of television (and apologies for the gorram commercial in the last several seconds of the youtube):
Naturally, CBS did not want us to "kill" the Henry Blake character. And so was sentimental, dear old 20th Century Fox. Killing a character in a half-hour show had never been done before. That was all the reason Gene [producer Gene Reynolds]and I needed to know we would have to do it. M*A*S*H was a fast track for actors, but the late McLean Stevenson, who played Henry, was not an actor in the classical sense. He was a personality, a terrific one. He had done a lot of television, and appeared in a good many commercials, but I don't think he ever felt completely comfortable working with experienced actors. Which is not to say that he didn't do a marvelous job. I think that after three years of co-starring in it, he felt the series had done a marvelous job for him, too - that it had served as a showcase for his talents and he would move on, get his own writers, producers, and directors, and do for himself what we had all done for each other. M*A*S*H, however, was a once-in-a-career confluence of collaborators, an experience not likely to be repeated simply because you hoped it would.
Though Mac was under contract to the series for an additional two years, Gene and I felt that it was everyone's best interest to let him leave. An unhappy actor in a group effort becomes a tremendous emotional burden for all concerned. We resolved that, instead of doing an episode in which yet another actor leaves yet another series, we would try to have Mac/Henry's departure make a point, one that was consistent with the series' attitude regarding the wastefulness of war; we would have that character die as a result of the conflict. After three years of showing faceless bit players portraying dying or dead servicemen, here was an opportunity to have a character that our audience knew and loved, one whose death would mean something to them.
Gene and I worked out a story entitled, "Abyssinia, Henry" - Abyssinia being a 20's expression meaning "I'll be seeing you." The phrase struck us as very breezy, very Henry Blake-ish. We asked two writers, a pair of M*A*S*H stalwarts, Everett Greenbaum and the late Jim Fritzell, to write the episode. We distributed the finished script to the cast and various production departments, but removed the last page, which called for Radar to enter the O.R. with the communiqué that informs everyone that Henry Blake, who had been discharged, and was on his way back to his family in the States, Colonel Blake's plane went down in the Sea of Japan, he informs us ... and "there weren't no survivors."
We kept that one, last page under wraps, locking it in my desk drawer. The only cast member we let in on the secret was Alan. We planned the schedule for this episode so that the O.R. scene would be the last one we shot. There were, in fact, two O.R. sequences in that show: one in which Henry is informed by Radar that he, Henry, is going home, that he has received his discharge orders, and everyone in the room breaks into raucous song; the second, the one in which Radar reads the communique‚ announcing Henry's death.
After we shot the first scene, the one in which Henry gets the good news, the cast and crew, understandably, began to wrap, pulling the plug on the episode, and for that matter, the whole season. There were a great many visitors on the set: spectators, press, family, friends, easily a couple of hundred people. We asked everyone to wait a few minutes, that we had one more piece of business to finish. I had a couple of words privately with Billy Jurgensen, our cinematographer. I told him what was up, and asked him to position his camera for the one additional scene. I did not want to rehearse it; we would shoot it only once. Then, taking the cast aside, I opened a manila envelope that contained the one-page last scene, telling them I had something I wanted to show them.
"I don't want to see it!" Gary Burghoff exploded. "I know you! You've got pictures of dead babies in there!" Assuring him I didn't, I gave each a copy of the one page scene to read to themselves. Each had a different reaction. "Fucking brilliant," said Larry Linville. "You son of a bitch," Gary said to McLean. "You'll probably get an Emmy out of this!" Mac, who had stayed to watch the filming of he knew was his last M*A*S*H, was speechless. But that doesn't begin to say it.
We returned to the set and shot the scene. Gary was unbelievably touching as he read the message on-camera. The others reacted with a kind of heartfelt sincerity that was stunning - their performance based on their real surprise and lingering shock, their awareness of how much Mac meant to them. The performances of the extras and crew, hearing of Henry's death for the first time, as the cameras were rolling were all one could ask of them.
Unhappily, there was some sort of technical glitch. Either the boom mike or a light or whatever could go wrong did and we had to shoot it again. I was heartsick. I thought Gary would never be able to do a second take as beautifully as he did the first. He was better. And on that second go, a totally unexpected thing happened. After Gary finished reading his message, there was a hushed silence in the O.R. set, as B.J.'s camera panned the stricken faces of the actors, and then someone off-camera accidentally let a surgical instrument drop to the floor.
It was perfect, that clattering, hollow sound, filling a palpable void in a way that no words could. I could not have planned it better; I wish I had planned it - whenever I happen to hear it again, I marvel at how perfectly it worked out.
Mac left the stage without a word to anyone; he couldn't stay for the wrap party. The scene destroyed him. I learned later he sat crying in his dressing room for hours. We received a tremendous amount of mail from people saying say that it wasn't true, that Henry wasn't really dead. They felt that we had jerked their emotions around, that M*A*S*H was a comedy show and it wasn't fair to do what we did to them. I think it's fair to say that over the years we had given them fair warning that we might make them care from time to time.
Like the surgeons at the end of that scene, I have to get back to work now.