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Death was one of the many subjects that was rarely allowed to intrude into television series of the 1950s and 60s. Although nowadays characters who are written out of TV shows often shuffle off this mortal coil from disease, accident, or homicide (fates that claimed several regular characters on the hospital drama ER alone), that phenomenon was unheard of in television's first few decades. Part of the reason why producers of television series in the 1950s and 60s were loath to kill off their characters was simply good business sense: If a character had to be dropped because the actor who portrayed him was no longer available (due to illness, a contract dispute, or the actor's desire to leave television for film roles or other ventures), finding a way to write out the character without ending his life allowed for a smooth reintroduction should the actor later return to the fold. (The producers of Dallas famously faced a knotty problem when they killed off Bobby Ewing after actor Patrick Duffy quit the series, then had to find a way to resurrect the character when Duffy rejoined the cast a year later.) But a major reason why characters didn't die was simply because death was considered too serious a subject for the primarily light-hearted TV fare of the era. Bit players or guest stars might die, but series regulars were typically written out by having them go somewhere that took them away from a program's setting: they moved away to take jobs in other cities, they went off to college, they got married and left home, or they took extended trips abroad. This principle generally held true even when there was no chance an actor (and hence his character) would ever return. For example, when actor William Frawley fell seriously ill during the fifth season (1964-65) of My Three Sons and subsequently died, his Bub O'Casey character was said to have gone on a trip to Ireland, and for the remainder of the series his place was filled by actor William Demarest playing the role of Bub's brother, Charley. When actor McLean Stevenson announced in 1975 that he would be leaving the Korean War-based sitcom M*A*S*H at the end of the current season, the series' producers initially took what looked like a conventional approach to writing out his Col. Henry Blake character: At the beginning of the third season's final episode (Abyssinia, Henry), Col. Blake learned he had acquired enough points to be discharged and return stateside, and the rest of the episode was occupied with his preparing to go home and the other characters' taking their tearful leave of him. But an unexpected twist of one short final scene was tacked onto the end of the episode, in which a choked-up Radar (portrayed by Gary Burghoff) intruded into a busy operating room to deliver the sad news that Col. Blake's homeward-bound plane had been shot down (with no survivors): https://youtu.be/E_RWAc1uvUQSo shocking to the viewing audience was the surprise of a familiar character's dying tragically and unexpectedly that a legend grew out of it — one which held that the rest of the M*A*S*H cast themselves did not know what fate was going to befall the Col. Blake character until they were actually filming the scene in which it was announced. For example, the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) entry for the Abyssinia, Henry states that: Although the other M*A*S*H actors did not know while they were filming the rest of Abyssinia, Henry that it would ultimately end with Col. Blake's death, they did know what was going to happen before they undertook the episode's final scene. As actor Jamie Farr (who played Corporal Klinger) relates in The Complete Book of M*A*S*H, writer/director Larry Gelbart showed the cast the script's final page and solicited their comments before they assembled to shoot that memorable last scene: Larry Gelbart confirmed that account in his own book, Laughing Matters: Although the cast (with the exception of Alan Alda) was in the dark about the episode's resolution until the last minute, it was not kept a surprise from the cast until the moment when Gary Burghoff's character ran into the operating room to announce the news: A subsidiary legend associated with this episode holds that Reynolds and Gelbart opted to take the unusual course of killing off the Henry Blake character in order to spite actor McLean Stevenson for being difficult and walking out in the middle of a five-year contract. Larry Gelbart also disclaimed that legend:
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