M*A*S*H

Duke Forrest, the Georgia surgeon the TV series cut, is still here as the third member of the original swamp trio. That alone makes Richard Hooker's 1968 novel a different company of doctors from the one viewers know. The book is closer to the source than anything on screen, because the series came to it through Robert Altman's film rather than directly. What the novel offers is the dry-eyed version. Hooker writes dark, sarcastic farce about surgeons in Korea, and he does not soften it with the drama and reflection the show took on over eleven seasons. Hooker reportedly disliked what television made of his material, and reading the book shows what he meant: the pranks and the operating-room exhaustion sit side by side, with no laugh track and no lesson.

Larry Gelbart developed the series from Robert Altman's 1970 film, with its Ring Lardner Jr. screenplay, rather than straight from Richard Hooker's 1968 novel. That makes the show a third-hand version of the story, and much of what separates it from the book arrived through the film first. Only the original novel counts as source material. The sequels, M*A*S*H Goes to Maine and the Butterworth-written M*A*S*H Goes to Paris, are not sources for the series. The novel's three lead surgeons, Hawkeye Pierce, Trapper John and Duke Forrest, become two on television. Duke, the Deep Southerner, is dropped. Other characters and elements from the book carried over into the film and the series while some were cut entirely, and those changes reportedly caused friction among the franchise's creators. Hooker is said to have liked the film but not the TV show. The tone shifted most of all. The book is dark, sarcastic and dry-eyed. Across 11 seasons on CBS, the series leaned increasingly toward drama, and under Alan Alda's influence it became something quite its own. The research does not say whether the book's ending was changed, so no difference there is claimed.