10 TV Shows That Should Have Quit While They Were Ahead

9. M*A*S*H

One of the most celebrated television shows - of any kind - of all time, M*A*S*H (it stood for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital) ran for eleven years from 1972 to 1983. Famously, that's nearly four times longer than the Korean War, the setting for the show.

After the gamechanging, heartbreaking end of season three, M*A*S*H took on a more serious tone, becoming a 'dramedy'. That made the show a bigger hit with critics... but by the eighth season, only two of the main cast who'd helped to make M*A*S*H such a commercial success were still working on the show.

What's more, they were running out of ideas, and recycling them at a rate of knots. Initially, interviews with medical personnel who'd lived through the Korean War made up the source material for each season, as the plotlines from the book and film from which the show was adapted didn't last long.

Even those interview transcripts gave up the ghost after a while, and in the last few years the army surgical consultants who worked on the show would regularly call the producers with ideas, to be informed that they'd already been done. There was precious little conflict left between the characters, either: for the most part, they had all become good friends through sheer inertia.

An American television institution by the time it wound up in 1983, it's safe to say that M*A*S*H had been coasting for a good three years prior to that. It was a testament to the charm of actors like Alan Alda, Mike Farrell and David Ogden Stiers that M*A*S*H maintained audience goodwill to the very end.