To help mark the end of the 2011-2012 television season, Entertainment Weekly has published its list of the 20 Best TV Series Finales Ever. M*A*S*H ranks sixth on the list; here’s the five shows that were ranked higher:

• 6. M*A*S*H
• 5. Cheers
• 4. The Mary Tyler Moore Show
• 3. The Fugitive
• 2. St. Elsewhere
• 1. Hewhart

You can’t see the whole list anywhere because it is a slideshow, meaning you have to click through to see all twenty shows. As is often the case, a good number are from the 1990s/2000s. But not, surprisingly, in the Top Five.

The UK’s Radio Times website has a poll running asking visitors “What’s the best TV ending of all time?” (both season and series finales) and one of the 20 poll options is the series finale of M*A*S*H, “Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen” (originally broadcast February 28th, 1983). A direct link to the poll can be found here. Currently, M*A*S*H has 3% of the vote, which by my count has it tied for 7th. The current winner is the second season finale of the BBC’s Sherlock, with 41% of the vote.

Yahoo! News has a feature called Who Knew? in which a short video is presented and then a brief quiz offered. Today’s entry is titled Series Finales: “House” And “Desperate Housewives” Ending This Month, Can They Compare To Classic Finales?. The video mentions the series finale of M*A*S*H (“Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen,” originally broadcast February 28th, 1983) about eight seconds in. Here’s the video followed by a partial transcript:

The gold standard for series finales is still the final episode of M*A*S*H in 1983. 106 million viewers watched the poignant goodbye to Hawkeye, a record that still stands. The final episode of The Fugitive in 1967 owns the record for the largest share of the audience, though. 72% of American households tuned in to see if Doctor Richard Kimble caught the one-armed man.

Notice anything wrong with that statement? Perhaps not. I doubt most M*A*S*H fans know without looking it up but “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen” averaged a 77% Nielsen share, giving it the record for the largest share of the audience for a series finale, not The Fugitive as the video asserts. It was correctly identified as drawing the most viewers, however. Fun fact: that 77% share was not a record back in 1983. Read more at my Goodbye, Farewell and Amen Ratings Analysis.

After reporter Robert Pierpoint, whose voice was heard announcing the end of the Korean War in “Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen,” passed away last year at the age of 86, I wondered whether the audio heard in the episode was Pierpoint’s original radio report or a recreation. Two people left comments stating they had heard or read that it was in fact a recreation. I was flipping through Suzy Kalter’s The Complete Book of M*A*S*H the other day and came across the following in Burt Metcalfe’s essay about Season Eleven:

The voice of Robert Pierpoint, which is broadcast over the PA system to give the steps toward the signing of the peace treaty, was real. We had thirty-year-old tapes, but the quality was so bad that Pierpoint agreed to rerecord. Static was later added to make it sound authentic. Pierpoint basically repeated his announcement of the end of the war as it was then.

So there you have it, straight from the executive producer.

Source:

Tuesday was the 29th anniversary of “Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen” airing on CBS (it was originally broadcast on Monday, February 28th, 1983). To commemorate the anniversary, here’s a segment from Entertainment Tonight about the end of M*A*S*H:

I’ve had this spotlight available as a feature for years but the above is a much higher quality version.