HISTORY's Moments in Media: M*A*S*H's Record-Setting Finale

What makes the number remarkable is how much the TV audience has grown while the M*A*S*H record has held. This season, according to Nielsen, there are 120.6 million television households in the country; back in 1983, there were only 83.3 million.

The M*A*S*H broadcast scored a 60 rating back then, meaning that 60 percent of all households in the country tuned in. Amazingly, it also earned a 77 share, meaning that more than three-quarters of households watching television at that time were watching M*A*S*H. Starting in 2010, as the total number of television households approached 115 million, Super Bowl broadcasts began beating the M*A*S*H finale in terms of total viewers. But they don't dominate the landscape the way that M*A*S*H episode did. Super Bowl XLIX is now the most-watched show ever, with more than 114 million viewers; even so, it drew only a 47.5 rating and a 71 share.

There's a simple reason why no program except the Super Bowl has been able to eclipse the M*A*S*H finale. The way television works has changed so much, it's essentially impossible for one program, except live sports, to gather such a wide swath of Americans at their sets. In 1983, there were only three broadcast networks; Rupert Murdoch launched Fox, the fourth network, in 1986. In 1980, there were only 16 million cable subscribers in America; in 1984, Congress passed the Cable Act, which helped drive subscribers to 53 million by the end of the decade. In 1983, there was no DVR, no streaming services, and VHS was still considered relatively new. If you wanted to watch something on TV, there were only a few options to choose from and you had to watch what you wanted to watch when it aired or tape it.

The two-and-a-half-hour final episode of M*A*S*Hwas such a major event in the watch-it-in-real-time era that, according to the UPI, more than a million New Yorkers went to the bathroom in the half hour after the episode ended, pulling an extra 6.7 million gallons of water through the city's water mains.

Nearly from its beginning, M*A*S*H struck a chord. It was a top-10 show for nine of its 11 seasons — all except its weak premiere year, when it ranked 46, and the 1975–1976 TV season when it bounced around the CBS schedule and dropped to number 15.

Based on the 1970 Robert Altman movie of the same name, M*A*S*H is a dark satire of war that focused on the doctors, nurses, and other staff at an Army medical camp — a mobile Army surgical hospital, or MASH — during the Korean War. It was an attack on the absurdities and horror of war that commented on the end of the Vietnam era by looking back at America's previous conflict. It was also one of the first television shows to use the classic half-hour sitcom form to tell dramatic stories, and one of the first to use cinematic shooting techniques, including shooting on location rather than exclusively on a soundstage. In interviews, Alan Alda, one of the show's stars and one of its driving creative forces, has credited the show's success both to the quality of the cast and crew who made it and to the way audiences connected to its complex characters.

There have been other beloved series since M*A*S*H, with other finales that felt like major national events. But the M*A*S*H finale remains the standard against which all TV show finales measured. In 1998, the Seinfeld finale garnered 76 million viewers; in 2004, 52 million Americans watched Friends say farewell. No finale has ever earned a higher rating or share than the M*A*S*H's, and it's unlikely that one ever will.

Today, the list of the 20 most-watched broadcasts of all time includes 19 Super Bowls — and that last episode of M*A*S*H.

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