Poker night in Hell

One of the hardest scripts David Isaacs and I ever wrote was THE MERCHANT OF KOREA episode of MASH (season 6). It was the first script that introduced the character of Charles Emerson Winchester (although it didn’t air until later in the season) so in many ways it was a pilot. But that wasn’t the difficulty.

The reason the script was so tough was because it featured an extended poker game. We’ve written poker scenes in other sitcoms and the problems are always the same.

The first issue is that you have to be true to the game. So you have to pay strict attention to who has what cards, and how you maneuver the betting to achieve your desired result. You also have to have characters spell things out to the portion of the audience that doesn’t really understand the game. What hand beats another hand? And how do you convey that to the viewer? You need them to know enough that they can follow the story. But you come up against the age-old writing problem of characters telling other characters things they already know. So you have to very deftly dole out your exposition.

And you need to make the scene funny. Not easy with just five people sitting at a table playing cards.

But wait – there’s more!

Editing is a bitch. You can’t take out too much or the game stops making sense. Or at the very least, people are betting and making decisions way too quickly and unnaturally. They need time to call. And what about poker games where there are individual rounds of cards issued, not five cards all at once? If a player wants new cards he has to ask for them and receive them. All of that must be covered. It’s not unusual for the writing room to get confused once they dive back into a poker scene. “How many cards have been issued?” “What was Hawkeye’s hand?” “Does Hot Lips get to call before BJ?” “Which players have folded by this point?” You get the idea.

Poker games are also murder during production. In terms of continuity, imagine having to remember exactly how many chips and what cards each player has at any given moment in the script. And where they are on the table (along with snacks, drinks, ashtrays, what-have-you).

And for the director, he’s always in danger of “going over the line.” What’s that? To explain simply: there is an imaginary line that runs through the middle of a scene. And if you have a shot that goes over that line it can be disorienting to the viewers. Characters may be looking in the wrong direction, etc. Camera coverage of poker games are always fraught with danger.  

Plus, if you’re doing the poker game in front of a studio audience (multi-cam), you generally don’t want someone sitting with his back to the camera and audience. None of the cameras will be able to see his face. And if you leave that seat vacant it always looks a little weird. Five people are jammed together while a chair stays empty. I tip my hat to THE ODD COUPLE TV show. They did lots of poker games. We did too on MASH but generally tried to make them very short or cut away to something else so we could come back just when we needed to without having to show all the logistics that got us there.

So that’s why I’m so proud of THE MERCHANT OF KOREA episode. Yes, we introduce a major character (pun only intended in retrospect) and wrote what I thought was a clever and funny episode, but my main source of pride is that… it seems to make sense.

Meanwhile, you will never see me and David doing to reboot of MAVERICK.