Alright, so we can all agree that the show got a little preachy and not-great during the last few years. But those first few years were just astonishingly good. Based on the popular movie, M*A*S*H become one of those true cultural institutions pretty much from the get go. Intelligent, funny and, when it needed to be, exceptionally dramatic. True, it wasnt as accessible as I Love Lucy, and it certainly wasnt as safe, but it was very much better. Nothing Lucy ever did was nearly as gripping as that moment when Radar came into the operating theater to inform us that Colonel Blakes plane had been shot down.