Small-Screen Insurgency

Forty years after it officially ended, there remains a remarkable dearth of scholarship on fictional television’s wartime treatment of the conflict in Vietnam. At best, programs set in the Southeast Asian country show up in the literature sporadically and in passing. At worst, their existence is denied or they have been minimized to the point of irrelevance. ¹ Julian Smith, while acknowledging that he had not made “a formal study of the extent to which Vietnam was the subject of television drama,” wrote that a “casual poll of regular viewers” turned up only two instances in which the war appeared on fictional television: Some May Live (CBS, 1967) and The Final War of Olly Winter (CBS, 1967). ² Rick Worland, whose insightful study of political fantasy in Cold War television addressed the war’s brief appearance in The Twilight Zone (CBS, 1959–1964) and The Outer Limits (ABC, 1963–1965), wrote that “prime-time network television, which had largely succeeded in becoming America’s chief medium of popular entertainment,” followed Hollywood’s lead in “similarly ignor[ing] Vietnam.” ³ Daniel Hallin, meanwhile, maintained in the Encyclopedia of Television that, as the Vietnamese revolution unfolded, “it was virtually never touched in television fiction—except, of course, in disguised form on M*A*S*H.” ⁴