#especially frank

Rick x Frank doodles I did last night that I decided to clean up and color in

I knew I was going to get this question so you're going to have to indulge my preamble. "Least favorite" does not mean "I dislike this character." It means "I like this character less relative to the other characters in this show." My baseline for MASH character is extremely high. I don't dislike any of them! But I like some more or less than others. So with that in mind.

BJ Hunnicutt

He's just less interesting to me than anyone else. I can say a lot of critical things about his writing and Mike Farrell's acting and I'm sure these things play into why I find him less interesting and care about him less. But at the end of the day, I just do. I don't have a lot of strong feelings about him. If he weren't popular in the fandom, I probably wouldn't think about him much. He's fine. But a lot of other characters either have an iron grip on my attention or make me laugh just by standing there and BJ doesn't do either of these things. There are some episodes where I do enjoy him a lot.

There are other episodes where I do situationally dislike him, and it's largely because the narrative usually takes BJ's side and validates him even when he's wrong, usually for the purpose of taking Hawkeye down a peg whether he deserves it or not. No matter how BJ behaves, the show never stops treating him as "the good guy" while Hawkeye is "the naughty one" in comparison and that's a dynamic that's always going to make me defensive of the naughty one.

Also I find his entire style from season 7 on fugly as hell. Especially the mustache, but not only the mustache. His haircut is a disaster and I hate most of his outfits, including the pink shirt. You wouldn't think this would matter but, well, I have a quirk about this. I struggle with certain seasons of The West Wing because the characters are styled in a way that's so viscerally ugly to me. I was devastated when The X-Files shifted to more early 2000s styles that I hated. I don't have this problem with real people but with TV characters... it's an issue, lol. I don't enjoy looking at him! Maybe I'm just too gay, who knows.

Ken Levine, one of the former head writers, admitted on his blog that he never thought they gave BJ the writing he deserved, and I think it shows. He's kind of all over the place.