MASH
TCM, 10:15 p.m. ET
In this 1970 movie directed so inventively by Robert Altman, Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould play renegade Army surgeons Hawkeye Pierce and Trapper John, the roles played in the subsequent TV series by Alan Alda and Wayne Rogers, respectively. The Korean War setting is the same in both the TV show and the movie, but Altman’s take is much darker, and there are other differences as well. The only film actor to reprise his or her role for the CBS spinoff is Gary Burghoff, who played clairvoyant Army clerk Radar O’Reilly. Otherwise, the now familiar roles in the series were played by other actors in the film that preceded it. In Altman’s movie, Robert Duvall played Frank Burns, with Sally Kellerman as “Hot Lips,” Roger Bowen as Col. Henry Blake, and Rene Auberjonois as Father Mulcahy. Oh, and one other difference between the movie and the long-running, phenomenally popular CBS series? On TV, the title had asterisks, and was called M*A*S*H. On film, MASH was asterisk-free.