However, a major omission from their list was one of the most shocking deaths of a major TV character I can remember. Lt. Col. Henry Blake, played by McLean Stevenson, died offscreen at the end of the third season of MASH. Stevenson asked to be released from his contract. The show's writers reluctantly penned him an exit in the final episode of the 1974-75 season, in which Lt. Col. Blake was discharged, only to board a plane that was shot down over the Sea of Japan, killing everyone on board (a development added after scripts were distributed so the show's actors would display genuine emotion as if they had been truly unaware of that part of the storyline). It was quite a shocker, because they just didn't kill off major characters in TV shows back in the 1970s and nobody had any idea it was going to happen. How could EW leave that out?
Click here to see the (in)complete list.
3 comments:
Her's death did shock me
You wrote, "How could EW leave that out?" Answer: 'Cuz the staff of EW is probably of the younger generation for whom nothing exists in the continuum of time unless they themselves experienced it. Because they weren't even born in 1975, they probably have no idea there ever was a TV show called "M*A*S*H" ... or a Korean War, for that matter.
I still haven't gotten over Jenny's death on All My Children back in 1983. God, that was so sad. . . .
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