While it has been 35 years since ABC’s groundbreaking medical drama began, the show remains the greatest small screen series about the Vietnam War to date. There is no shortage of great medical TV shows, from classics like St. Elsewhere and E.R. to more recent hits like HBO’s two-season masterpiece The Pitt. There is also no shortage of great Vietnam War movies, from Platoon and Apocalypse Now to Casualties of War and Full Metal Jacket.

However, there are very few instances of these two genres converging in the same project. Admittedly, one of the greatest sitcoms ever made, MASH, was literally named after the acronym for a Mobile Army Hospital Unit. However, while that classic did use its story to indirectly comment on the then-ongoing Vietnam War, it is important to note that MASH wasn’t technically a medical drama or a Vietnam War show. MASH was set in Uijeongbu, South Korea, during the Korean War, and it was a sitcom.

The show’s sharp satire often blends tragedy and comedy, and its creators clearly condemned America’s invasion of Vietnam through their writing of the series. However, MASH was fundamentally a comedy show about the Korean War, rather than a medical drama about the Vietnam War. For that, viewers would instead need to seek out ABC’s unfairly forgotten masterpiece China Beach, a wildly underrated four-season series that aired 62 episodes from 1988 until 1991.

ABC’s Forgotten Masterpiece China Beach Is Still Television’s Best Vietnam War Drama

Co-created by Apollo 13 screenwriter William Broyles Jr and John Sacret Young, China Beach was set in the fictional 510th Evacuation Hospital in My Khe Beach, Da Nang. Partially based on American writer Lynda Van Devanter’s 1983 memoir, Home Before Morning, China Beach took a similar approach to the classic sitcom MASH, albeit with a more dramatic and less comedic outlook.

Like MASH, which was based on Dr. Richard Hornberger’s novel MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors and its 1970 movie adaptation by director Robert Altman, China Beach had a large cast of US Army doctors, nurses, soldiers, officers, volunteers, and civilians. Like MASH, the show was more concerned with illustrating the ways that the war impacted their lives as it was in depicting the conflict itself, but China Beach took this further by exploring the lives of the characters after they finished their tours of duty.

In some cases, China Beach even followed these characters after they returned to America. Dana Delany’s First Lieutenant Colleen McMurphy was the show’s equivalent of MASH’s antihero Hawkeye, and her resilience ensured that the moving, often heartbreaking series never became entirely downbeat. Nan Woods, Marg Helgenberger, and Brian Wimmer rounded out China Beach’s impressive cast, which won numerous awards during the show’s celebrated run.

China Beach Shows A Very Different Side To War From Most TV Series

The iconic director and film critic François Truffaut famously claimed that no director could create a truly anti-war movie, and the same is undoubtedly true for TV shows. From Band of Brothers to Generation Kill, even the best war shows end up inadvertently glamorizing war solely because they need exciting storylines to keep viewers invested, likable characters for the audience to root for, and a clear storyline that viewers want to follow until the end.

Although China Beach had all of these things in spades, the show’s focus on the injured, dying, and civilian casualties of war gave it a very different feel from most war shows. Where even hits like Apple TV’s Masters of the Air were criticized for feeling sentimental and jingoistic, playing down the human cost of war to focus on the heroism of soldiers, China Beach doesn’t face this issue at all. Instead, the ABC show is one of the best war series ever precisely because China Beach never allows viewers to forget the real-life human cost of war.