"M∗A∗S∗H" has become as necessary to my Sundays as strong coffee, strong drink and strong women…. [It] is a crutch for the hobbled human spirit.

There were those who predicted last fall after "M∗A∗S∗H"'s television debut that the show couldn't last. How funny, after all, is wartime surgery? A onetime joke, isn't it? Perhaps in poor taste even the first time around: Korea with canned blood. And the endless hanky-panky with the nurses: now that sexism has become one of our critical categories, sex itself is suspect. Hotlips Hoolihan … was perceived by some of our gloomier ideologues to be an oppressed object.

Rubbish. Actually, Hotlips is one of the most sympathetic characters on the show, considerably more human, more multidimensional, than she was in the movie version of "M∗A∗S∗H." She has a past and a present, and she...