Episode one of the ABC series “China Beach” opened idyllically. The show’s protagonist, Colleen McMurphy (Dana Delany), reaches her toes into the warm, moist sand from her spot on a blanket. The setting could be Cancun or Waikiki, but the thrumming of unseen helicopters is a tip-off. Also, McMurphy is reading Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, his disparaging appraisal of U.S. naiveté in Vietnam. It’s a sign that someone smart had a hand in the program’s inception.
All 62 episodes of “China Beach,” which ran from 1988-1991, are collected together with bonus material in an elaborate DVD box set, “China Beach The Complete Series.” The program worked territory familiar from one of television’s most popular, long-running shows, “M.A.S.H.” If the Korean War setting of “M.A.S.H.” was generally acknowledged as a stand-in for Vietnam, “China Beach” promised the real deal—a medical evacuation hospital in the war zone near Da Nang. McMurphy is all about efficiency when the choppers land and the orderlies hurry to unload the casualties on stretchers. She has her moments of madness, but is the calm through-line of the series—the steady hand of competence and steady-beating heart of compassion.
The production values of “China Beach” were high, but while it had moments of tense drama, those moments were usually resolved formulaically. The remarkable thing is that after the national trauma of that lost and unpopular war, “China Beach” turned Vietnam into four seasons of weekly entertainment.
