10 TV Shows That Made You Answer Impossible Questions
5. MASH - What Would You Do To Ensure The Safety Of Many?
A television spin-off of Nashville auteur Robert Altman’s Korean war-set dramedy, MASH is an iconic series still listed alongside the likes of The Simpsons as one of TV’s most influential and ingenious offerings of the twentieth century. The show allowed the sitcom format to address serious, meaningful questions and provided a mainstream voice for anti-war advocacy in the dying years of America’s attack on Vietnam, and star Alan Alda ensured that the platform was used to great effect throughout the show’s long run.
Yes, some critics argue that later seasons were more uneven than the first few, and the show definitely did drag on a bit by the end. But the series finale, still one of the most-watched episodes in TV history, posed a moral problem so devastating that it ensured the show will always have a place in television history as a vital, brilliant work.
When our hero Hawkeye recounts a story of forcing a Vietnamese woman to silence her squawking chicken during a checkpoint, lest it endanger an entire busload of evacuees, viewers knew something stomach-twisting was coming. The brutal punchline of the scene which reveals it was a baby Hawkeye told her to smother, rather than a pet, has lost none of its power in the intervening decades, and still leaves audiences struggling with what the right decision would have been in Hawkeye’s impossible position.