M*A*S*H Finale “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen” (1983)

On February 28, 1983: M*A*S*H finale “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen” aired on CBS.

M*A*S*H ended its 11-season run with the 2 1/2-hour finale “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen” (with no Oxford comma), directed by star Alan Alda and written by a team of M*A*S*H writers including Burt Metcalfe, John Rappaport, Dan Wilcox, and Thad Mumford. Viewer anticipation to the heavily promoted finale was unprecedented for a television series and bordered on a national mania.

The final days of filming the prior month had attracted the media to the Agoura Hills, California filming location. In an unprecedented move, a press conference was held on the final day of filming. In what were almost certainly the first instances of celebrations of this type, when the airdate arrived, M*A*S*H finale parties were held at venues in multiple cities, eagerly covered by the local news on CBS affiliates. City council meetings were rescheduled. Restaurants and bars set up televisions and video projectors to show the finale to patrons and advertised “MASH Bashes” in newspapers. People wore fatigues, surgical scrub suits, and dressed like Max Klinger. Army surplus stores reported running out of fatigues, scrub suits, and olive-green t-shirts. 5,000 people attended an invitation-only M*A*S*H party at the Oakland Coliseum arena thrown by the Oakland A’s baseball team. Hospitals set up M*A*S*H displays such as at the St. Elizabeth Medical Center in Granite City, Illinois, who created a sandbag bunker with vintage Jeep in the cafeteria. In Indianapolis, the national guard created replicas of the M*A*S*H operating room tent and Hawkeye’s ‘swamp’ complete with a still made from a potbelly stove. Tony Packo’s restaurant in Toledo, Ohio that had been mentioned on the show several times by Jamie Farr’s character was packed to capacity. Bumper stickers and t-shirts were sold at many venues. Newspapers printed guides to how you could throw your own M*A*S*H party.

CBS originally estimated 125 million people viewed the finale, while Nielsen later officially counted it as just under 106 million – some 46% of the US population at the time – tuning in to watch. It was the most-watched TV broadcast in American history until surpassed in total viewers by the 2010 Super Bowl. However, it’s 60.3 Nielsen rating and incredible 77 audience share remains the record holder for a scripted television broadcast, surpassing the famous ‘Who Shot J.R.’ episode of Dallas, the finale of Cheers, and unforgettable TV movie The Day After. When CBS rebroadcast the finale in August following a summer of reruns, they sent out press materials to promote it, as this would be the last time M*A*S*H aired on the CBS network. The following week, the M*A*S*H time slot was occupied by new spin-off series, AfterMASH, covered on a Forgotten TV episode.

By late spring 1983, the M*A*S*H finale was being released on home video formats such as VHS, Laserdisc, and RCA Videodisc. Video stores such as the Video Shack in Paterson, New Jersey held events like the “MASH BASH”, celebrating the release with giveaways of M*A*S*H memorabilia. In 1992, the finale was finally syndicated, allowing TV stations already airing M*A*S*H reruns first crack at it. A decade after it originally aired, local stations were proudly airing it in prime time as an alternative to whatever was airing on the major networks. Counting home video and reruns, “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen” may be the most watched program of scripted television entertainment in history.

M*A*S*H the series had already entered off-network rerun syndication in September 1979. By February 1980, it was being shown in 150 TV markets and winning its time slot in most of them. Three years later, it was being shown up to 16 times a week in some markets, counting afternoon, early evening, late-night, and weekend timeslots, leading production company Fox Television to state “The sun never sets on a M*A*S*H episode.” Over 40 years after the series ended, it is still being shown on broadcast television, and available to watch on streaming, digital download, and DVD.  

When the Covid pandemic began, and people were homebound, M*A*S*H showed an uptick in popularity even among younger demographics as people that grew up watching the reruns returned to it as comfort TV, as noted by Ryan Patrick, co-host of the podcast M*A*S*H Matters. “The themes of the show are universal, and they stand the test of time. The idea of finding humor and finding ways to cope in the midst of madness. I think that’s one reason that a lot of people returned to M*A*S*H during the pandemic.”  

M.A.S.H: The Complete Series DVD