Hawkeye Pierce

So your final clue is going to be the character here.

We're talking about Hawkeye Pierce.

All right.

What is the show?

perfectHow dare you call me that?

[gentle music] And of course, Hawkeye Pierce, the sarcastic Korean War combat surgeon.

Oh, Radar, all the nurses have heard about sex.

I know.

And the winner is Alan Alda, MASH.

For his work on MASH, Alda won five of his six Emmy awards for acting, writing, and directing.

Has Hawkeye Pierce led anybody to become a doctor? Have you heard that?

I have doctors coming up to me on the street all the time telling me that seeing me in the show made them wanna become a doctor.

MASH, a novel about three army doctors.

We're following surgeons Hawkeye Pierce, played by Donald Sutherland, and Trapper John, played by Elliott Gould.

They're surrounded by casualties, and they're using elaborate, deeply inappropriate pranks to cope.

Attention, attention, all personnel report to the compound.

uh mash one key

all right jumping up to our one key question a reminder for listeners that there are two unlocked questions in each category a one key a two key and a three key just because the dynamic of two players makes it so it's a little harder to accrue keys so the one key question and all stars is the middle difficulty question and it is this for you ian While he originally joked to Hawkeye Pierce that his initials could stand for anything you want and frequently played along with Hawkeye's teasing guesses like Belvedere Jehoshaphat, where do B.J. Honeycutt's initials actually

come from? They're his parents' initials.

Do you need me to be more specific?

correctly that it he got it from howard hawks so i'm because i'm a big howard hawks fan i'm sort of quite quite familiar with this thing where you can't really hear what anyone's saying and and then someone said you get all that you know and uh and the what i love about this is there's somebody who's there's an adc i think who's an officer who's supposed to be running the camp who had no idea what's going on yeah that's that's former

Which again is entirely, there's a radar, there's a Vorma, there's a Hawkeye in any sort of camp like this.

And Vorma is the person that follows the rules, obeys everything and is completely oblivious to what's going on.

And so the first line about I give everything to radar is, yeah, just says everything perfectly.

Yes.

Yeah.

And we get this idea of Hawkeye.

I mean, I wonder if Hawkeye is a slightly anachronistic character.

I'm very proud of that.

Uh, and if you're wondering, "Hey, Richard, is that Hawkeye Pierce from MASH?" Yes, it is.

I made a fake Instagram and a fake email to reach out to these people to see, you know, what they offer, like what they say they do.

And I actually-- a lot of my conversations have been deleted, so I don't have them anymore, which kind of sucks.

Played less well by an actor less high-strung, less deeply forlorn, the whole series could have expired in its infancy.

High-strung and forlorn was Hawkeye Pierce.

The fundamental decency was all Alan Alda's.

The only person ever to win Emmys as a performer, writer, and director.

And it was a big thing growing up, you know, definitely watching the series.

And Alan Alda's Hawkeye Pierce, not necessarily Alan Alda in his other roles, but Hawkeye Pierce...

in a strange way reminds me of my dad.

They both had like, they both had like these, I don't, I never knew if it was something that happened on purpose but they both had these robes like kind of like dark kind of like wine colored robes that Alan Alda's Hawkeye Pierce wore in the show and that my dad had and also you know my dad was kind of a jokester and like a cut up in the way that Hawkeye is but also like a very serious guy so it matched the show definitely had a bit of that cachet for me growing up.

And, you know, I watched the movie, like, I'd seen it a couple times before re-watching it.

I feel like my sense of M.A.S.H. hasn't really changed.

I feel like it's hard to divorce it from the TV show, and Robert Altman, who hated the TV show, is probably rolling over in his grave every time anybody compares the two.

It's hard to divorce the two because you just, like, somebody says the words Hawkeye or Trapper John and you kind of think of the TV show and then you think, oh yeah, what about that thing that happened in the TV show where they went to, you know, they went to go play golf and got caught in the middle of a firefight or something like that and it's like, oh, that doesn't happen in this movie, you know.