He was afraid the show would end in the first season he joined, and he’d forever after be known as “the guy who sank M*A*S*H.” I think we can safely say he was not—even if you don’t like the BJ Hunnicutt years, he was on the show more than twice as long as Wayne Rogers as Trapper John had been. And if you don’t like the BJ Hunnicutt years, your problem probably isn’t with Mike Farrell himself, it’s probably with the writing. And he only wrote a few episodes.

It can’t have been easy to come in four seasons on, replacing a character who’d been so important to the series. Fortunately, the show let BJ feel that uncertainty as well, making it clear that he knew he wasn’t Trapper. It never tried to make him exactly the same. I’m sure there are people who see this as one more failing—BJ wasn’t the same sort of loud, womanizing rebel that Trapper was. He was quieter, devoted to his wife and daughter, more inclined to push back within the rules than completely ignore them. Frankly, BJ was a lot more of an intellectual than Trapper, though I’m aware it’s not a term anyone else would necessarily think to apply to him. His pranks were smarter and usually subtler.

Which is I think the change the show underwent at the same time—I think the show got smarter and subtler with the change to BJ, and he just represented it. Farrell just sailed its currents. And it is true that the show couldn’t have necessarily changed the way it did with its original cast. It would have been hard to take Trapper seriously as a grounding force to Hawkeye when you knew he’d done as much and worse—and, indeed, was actively and repeatedly cheating on his wife. And I can’t picture some of the riffs between BJ and Charles with any other character; BJ seemed to have the necessary education to keep up.

I mean, there’s more to Mike Farrell than BJ Hunnicutt, and maybe someone who’s actually watched Providence could tell you good things about him from that. I . . . am not that person. He had your basic Young TV Actor of the ’70s career in his pre-M*A*S*H days, and he made a fine Jonathan Kent in the animated Superman of the late ’90s. He doesn’t have much of a movie career, unlike Alan Alda, but unlike Alan Alda, he’s never been in a Woody Allen movie, so I guess there’s that? He’s dabbled in writing, directing, and producing—he produced Patch Adams, but I guess I can forgive him for that.

But I think it’s like Star Trek—it doesn’t matter, in the long run, what else you’ve done. You can coast forever on being one role, if that’s what you want to do, and there are plenty of people who are never going to see you as anything else anyway. As it happens, I think BJ was one of the purely nicest characters on the show, his occasional forays into practical joking notwithstanding, and one of the few characters I think I would genuinely want to spend any time around. So there are worse people to always be identified as, right?

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