I am sitting here watching an episode of the television show M*A*S*H on TVLand and it strikes just how amazingly good this show was. I have seen every episode of the series, and I own several seasons on DVD. In college, I would flip the TV on nearly every night and fall asleep as back-to-back episodes played in numerous rooms down the dungeon in Gessner Hall. I loved the show before college, and my fondness continued to grow with each rerun. The show is appealing on so many levels, and it is truly well-written. The characters have depth, and dialogue is intelligent. Tonight's episode, "Adam's Ribs", centers on one of the main characters' insatiable appetite for barbecued ribs from a little restaraunt in Chicago. At one point, the character, Hawkeye, bursts into a recitation of Carl Sandburg's poem titled after that same city. I never really caught most of the allusions made by the characters on the show until I had grown into adulthood. Fondness for the series developed into appreciation. Somehow, the writers of the show were able to implant a poetry recitation seamlessly into a conversation between a surgeon and a barely-literate company clerk. They play with language constantly, mingling innuendo and puns with slapstick humor or heartfelt monolugues. I guess that is why the show is still shown so often, so many years after its primetime run ended.
There is much lamentation these days about the downfall of American television. "They just do not have shows like MASH anymore!" That is accurate. There is no show like MASH out there today. If we only look at reality TV, then that is proof positive that TV is in a dire state. However, there are worthwhile shows out there. The Big Bang Theory is smartly-written and has developed well-rounded characters. For me, the best show on televsion today is Sons of Anarchy a show that will enter its sixth season on FX this fall. The show revolves around Jaxon Teller, his mother Gemma, his soulmate Tara, his stepfather Clay, and the other members of a California outlaw motorcycle club. The show is written by Kurt Sutter, who was a main writer several years ago on another incredible FX offering titled The Shield. That program followed the dirty deeds of a trgic hero named Vic Macky, a police detective who went dirty with the cleanest of intentions. Both of these shows contain their fair share of gunplay and well-beyond PG-13 visuals and languge. However, they also possess characters who wrestle with internal conflicts, created by who they are, who they hope to be, and who they are perceived to be. As they struggle to live their lives, their flaws are exposed, and their virtues tested. They are tragic heroes, as Shakespearean as Hamlet or Othello. Jax, of SOA, returns to the town where he grew up, where his mother has married Clay, Jax's father's closest friend, his brother in founding the motorcycle club. As time progresses, the voice of the dead father speaks to Jax through the journls he had left behind, and Jax eventually learns through his father's words in those journals and letters written before his death that Clay, and his lust for the father's wife, are to blame for his death. Does that sound familiar? In later seasons, we begin to see how Gemma, Jax's mother, thirsts for power, going so far as to attempt to set up the murder of the old King, I mean, club president. She has blood on her hands. "Out damned spot! Out!"
There are other sublties that add to the show's greatness. In one plotline, a young member of the club discovers that his father, a man he had never met and knew nother about, was African-American. The member, named Juice, is conflicted. The history of the club in the area of race relations has been less than stellar. For Juice, the club is everything. They are truly his family, and to lose the club would mean the end of his life. Does Juice trust his brothers and tell them the truth, risking the loss of his identify and family, or does he keep it a secret, a choice that could lead to even more dire consequences? Near the end of one episode, Juice pulls a chain from the back of a truck. I said out loud, "He is going to hang himself." In a few minutes, Juice climbed a tree, wrapped one end of the chain around a large branch and the other around his neck. He jumped. (I will not reveal how that plotline continued. You will have to watch the show.) Someone asked me, incredulously, "How did you know that?" It was simple, really. As Juice got out of the truck and headed toward the back where he would retrieve the chain, a song was playing. It took me two lines of the lyrics to recognize where the words came from: a poem/song titled "Strange Fruit". The poem is about strange fruit swinging from southern poplar trees. The strange fruit is the bodies of black men who had beeen lynched, lynched for no other reason than being black.
If you get a chance and are looking to fill some summer hours, find season one of Sons of Anarchy. You will be hooked. If that doe snot work out, I have DVDs of this show about a medical unit in the Korean War you might want to check out.
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