Ken Levine: ‘M*A*S*H’ 30th Anniversary Finale: Looking Back On The Event.

Good God. Really? Thirty years? I have a story about this….

I was a freshman in college. My roommate and I had a television — my television — a small back-and-white set from Sears, complete with CABLE (we were on the cutting edge of high tech!!) in our dorm room!

A bunch of friends gathered in our room that night to watch the finale and say goodbye to Hawkeye and BJ and Col. Potter and Klinger and the rest of the 4077th, characters that had defined our childhoods. And just as the program began, the geeks next door, geeks with no sense of collective pop culture, but geeks with a dial-up handset modem for their handmade “computer” fired that sucker up and wrecked our signal. We went crazy, beating on their door, screaming for them to turn it off.

They finally did and declined our invitation to watch with us; perhaps the only people in America that night not tuned in to see the goings-on in “The Swamp” one last time.