10 TV Mistakes You Can’t Unsee

The long running TV adaptation of Robert Altman’s satirical wartime black comedy may have one of the medium’s best finales to date, but like all shows it did drop the ball on occasion when it came to onscreen mistakes. Most of these mess-ups were largely inconsequential, but one flub later in the series managed to skip by set dressers and editors alike and man did it mess up the series chronology as a result.

You see, the show is set during America’s war with Korea, which predates the escalation of their invasion of Vietnam by a decade. So, when a stray magazine in one bunk mentions “The other war in Vietnam”, it’s talking about a war which hasn’t happened yet according to MASH’s timeline, but it make matters worse the show often not so subtly used the Korean War setting as an analogy with the ongoing Vietnam quagmire.

As a result, this headline is talking the same issues the show’s writers tackled—only in doing so it’s revealing that the series is actually taking place in the present, rather than the fifties it’s attempting to pass for

Come on, Alda—Altman would never have let that slip.