M*A*S*H might not have been the first sitcom to kill off a character — Make Room For Daddy did a between-seasons, offscreen death for Danny Thomas’s wife after actress Jean Hagen left in a huff — but it was the first to off one of its major players then deal with the emotional aftermath.
To make the fate of Henry Blake, played by McLean Stevenson, even more devastating, the show’s producers employed an unusual, emotionally manipulative tactic. “We did not get the ending of that,” Jamie Farr, who played Corporal Klinger, recently told PEOPLE. “We did not know that Colonel Blake was gonna die.”
Unlike Danny Thomas’s wife, who simply disappeared, M*A*S*H’s doctors and nurses got a chance to bid farewell to Blake, the 4077’s fearless leader, after he received an honorable discharge and headed for home. “I think I was in that Carmen Miranda outfit or something, and we waved goodbye to him at the helicopter when he was taking off to go stateside,” Farr remembered. “We finished that and we all went home afterwards.”
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But soon, the cast was summoned back to the set. “We got a call, all of us did,” Farr said. “They said there’s an added scene and that they needed us in the OR.”
That was … weird. The cast had already filmed what felt like a complete episode. “What do you mean, added scene?” said Farr. “We said goodbye.”
But there was still more. The show’s producers didn’t whisper a word to anyone, not the extras or the camera crew. They simply provided one additional page of script, explaining that Blake’s airplane had been shot down. There were no survivors.
“I know Gary Burghoff, Radar, who had to deliver that line, was upset,” Farr said.
The emotional wallop represented a tone shift for the show, evolving from sitcom to that new term, dramedy. “What they wanted to show was that people that you love die in war,” said Farr. “And they thought that was a good way of doing it because … Colonel Blake was such a lovable character.”
While critics applauded, not all viewers were on board. The show received more than a thousand letters, many from fans who didn’t think death belonged in a situation comedy. Producer Larry Gelbart responded to hundreds of the letters by hand, according to Making M*A*S*H. CBS and 20th Century Fox were also upset, with the network cutting off the final scene in at least one rerun. “It was a surprise, it was somebody they loved,” said the show’s co-creator Gene Reynolds. “They didn’t expect it, but it made the point. People like Henry Blake are lost in war.”
“To have somebody that’s a main character like that actually get killed,” said Farr, “was something that was shattering to everybody.”
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