Hogan's Heroes' Unceremonious Finale Comes From The Era Before ...

“Rockets Or Romance” ends with the prisoners putting their gyroscopic sabotage plan into action, right when Klink is about to launch a rocket toward London. Instead, the rocket heads to Burkhalter’s neighborhood, roughly in the area of his house. That ending was also par for the course for Hogan’s Heroes. Though the show wasn’t serialized, it did expect its audience to become familiar with characters’ traits and habits over time: Schultz’s gullibility, Klink’s cowardice, Burkhalter’s bourgeoisie tastes, and so on. That’s how the production originally got around the criticism that it was trying to sell the viewing public “funny Nazis.” In the world of Hogan’s Heroes, the Germans were primarily just petty bureaucrats, trying to get through the day and head home. The show wasn’t as overtly anti-war as M*A*S*H would be, but it did make fun of the business of war, by turning Klink into another harried sitcom dad and Hogan into his precocious teenager.

Regardless, Hogan’s Heroes was controversial, at least at first. Comedian Stan Freberg helped pitch the show with the tagline, “If you liked World War II, you’ll love Hogan’s Heroes!,” which struck some as offensive. The pilot episode featured Leonid Kinskey as a Russian prisoner, but the actor chose not to stick around for the rest of the series, because he said he was uncomfortable playing let’s-pretend with people in Nazi garb. Clary though, who was an actual Holocaust survivor, stood up for his show, saying that the Nazi stalags were very different from the concentration camps, and that the actual Nazis on Hogan’s Heroes—as opposed to bumbling working stiffs like Klink and Schultz—were depicted as both malicious and idiotic. Television audiences sided with Clary. Hogan’s Heroes was a top 10 ratings hit in its first season, and drew steady viewership thereafter, then did well in syndication around the world.

Perhaps that’s because all prison stories are figurative, at least to a degree. Whether the characters behind bars are cold-blooded killers or innocent victims of a malevolent authority, the movies, books, songs, and TV shows about them tend to be more about the common feeling of being trapped, and how people either make the best of a dire situation or attempt a daring escape. Albert S. Ruddy, who co-created Hogan’s Heroes with Bernard Fein—and later co-wrote one of the great prison films, The Longest Yard—originally intended to set the sitcom in a regular American jail, but rewrote the script when he heard that NBC was developing a show called Campo 44, set in an Italian WWII POW camp. (The Campo 44 pilot was later burned off in a one-off broadcast in 1967, and was accused by TV critics of ripping off Hogan’s Heroes.) In an interview on the Hogan’s Heroes complete-series DVD set, Ruddy says that it took less than a day to remake the show as a WWII farce, because the core of the premise never changed: It was always about these clever fellows and how they lived like kings in some of the worst conditions imaginable. It’s such a powerful fantasy, this idea of being able to turn an armed fortress into a secret clubhouse.

Ruddy also says that after they sold the pilot, he was offered a contract to become a writer on the show, but turned it down because he really wanted to get into movies, and only wrote a TV script in the first place after a writer friend of his told him how much money he could make as the creator of a network series. Ruddy says he didn’t have the temperament to treat writing like a 9-to-5 job, sitting in a conference room and coming up with stories and jokes for the same group of characters, week in and week out. He recognized that a hit TV show can itself be a kind of prison.

The Hogan’s Heroes cast experienced that, too. Though they claim in Royce’s book that they all got along reasonably well, resentments did fester the longer the show endured. Crane was reportedly irritated that Klemperer won two Emmys for Hogan’s Heroes, while he himself was shut out the two times he was nominated. Dawson had originally been considered to play Hogan, and some people involved with the show said that Dawson resented Crane for being the star. (In a rare interview on the Hogan’s Heroes DVD box set, Dawson dismisses that, saying that if he’d been the star of the show, “We would’ve been off in three episodes.”) And while everyone liked Banner, his castmates were occasionally annoyed by his habit of underplaying his lines in rehearsal and then stealing scenes when the cameras were pointed in his direction. Hogan’s Heroes was stuffed with colorful actors playing colorful characters, and they were all jostling for more airtime.

Once the series ended, most of Hogan’s Heroes’ stars had a tough time following it up. Dawson bounced back best, launching a successful second career as a game-show personality. Crane didn’t fare nearly as well. During the run of the show, he co-starred with Klemperer, Banner, and Askin in a Cold War farce called The Wicked Dreams Of Paula Schultz, and its failure would be a sign of things to come for Crane when he tried to branch out into movies. He had his best luck in dinner theater, touring the country. Crane’s Hollywood career was hampered by his close association with the character of Hogan, his reputation as a prickly on-set presence, and his undisguised preoccupation with sex. Crane was found murdered in an Arizona apartment in 1978, and while investigating the case—which remains unsolved—the police found caches of pornographic photos and movies, featuring Crane with various women.

Crane’s sordid death casts a shadow over Hogan’s Heroes even now, making the show a little harder to take as a family-friendly goof. Hogan’s Heroes’ approach to the sitcom form looks more quaint by the year, too. In “Rockets Or Romance,” Hogan mentions that he’s been a POW for four years, which is about as close as the show ever came to establishing any continuity. Hogan’s Heroes was more in the tradition of a traditional newspaper comic strip, where gags recur year after year, and the characters never really age or change.

But TV fans are mistaken if they think that medium has been profoundly transformed since 1971. Some series are more mature in their subject matter and storytelling now, but even the people in charge of those shows often admit that each week they’re just trying to figure out how best to fill their timeslot. Consider Justified, one of the best shows currently on television, which just wrapped up its fourth and best season, following a 13-episode arc that began with the characters trying to determine the identity and whereabouts of a long-vanished outlaw. Justified showrunner Graham Yost has admitted that they had no idea who the outlaw would turn out to be when the season started. They just set the mystery in motion, then followed it where it led. Those kinds of confessions flummox the “television as the new Great American Novel” crowd, who like to imagine more long-range planning and authorial intent than the practicalities of TV production usually allow.

Given that they both aired on the same network, and nearly consecutively, it’s easy to compare Hogan’s Heroes to the far more respected wartime sitcom M*A*S*H; while M*A*S*H had a few more serialized elements, it too relied on broad comic types, and had a continuity so muddled that it’s like nobody in the writers’ room was paying the least bit of attention to it. Which they weren’t, because that wasn’t something that was highly valued then. If M*A*S*H were on the air today, the Internet would be clamoring for its writers to come up with an “endgame” after the first couple of seasons, the way that people do today with How I Met Your Mother. (When, oh when, will the Korean War finally meet the mother?)

Even the greatest TV shows of the modern era have suffered from bum episodes, plot threads that never led anywhere fruitful, and references that seemed fresh at the time but now come off as distractingly dated. (Remember when the characters on Arrested Development spent an entire episode on the Atkins diet?) That’s the nature of this particular beast. With exceedingly rare exceptions, scripted television is designed to be an episode-to-episode exercise in what its creators find funny, gripping, thought-provoking, and personally meaningful. Even the most meticulously plotted-out modern series can be impacted by what’s happening behind the scenes, by real-world events that bleed into the scripts, or even by the 21st-century equivalent of John Banner and Werner Klemperer being so entertaining that they demand more screen time.

The hook is important. But the hook isn’t everything. It’s mainly a way to get people to tune in, at which point what really matters is what the creators of a show do to hold the audience’s attention. Someone once said that the person who really controls the airwaves is whatever slob happens to be standing in the right spot when the light on top of the camera turns red. But those slobs have to work fast and think on their feet, too, knowing that any moment could be the end.

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