We continue our look at some notable 1980s Christmas episodes by looking at a China Beach Christmas 1988 episode, “X-Mas Chn. Bch. VN, ’67,” where a short staff due to the Christmas holiday deals with an influx of wounded on Christmas Eve.
China Beach was an outstanding drama starring the captivating Dana Delany as Colleen McMurphy, an Army nurse during the Vietnam War, stationed at China Beach, a fictitious 510th Evacuation Hospital and R&R facility, so the show was split between the hospital drama with the doctors and nurses keeping soldiers alive before they head to other hospitals for further treatment (like M*A*S*H*, only more permanent), and then the rest and recreation facility where the soldiers party on their downtime before heading back into the war.
Delany won two Emmys for her role as the kind but troubled McMurphy (who deals with a lot of PTSD throughout the series, which flashes into the future to show how the war affected everyone’s life).
The other Emmy winner on the series was Marg Helgenberger, who played KC, a prostitute who slowly becomes a businesswoman in Vietnam and Hong Kong. She really wasn’t featured that much In this episode, where there is a Christmastime truce being worked out, so there is a short staff for the holidays. Captain Dick Richard (Robert Picardo), the main surgeon at China Beach, discovers from a holiday letter from his son that his wife is cheating on him. Richard had tickets to see Bob Hope’s USO show to help deal with the betrayal, but he is then forced to work during an influx of wounded soldiers. The “Will they or won’t they?” between McMurphy and Richard was a big part of the show. They were best friends, but obviously there was more there, highlighted in the image here when Richard kisses her under the mistletoe (they almost kiss for REAL later in the episode, but are interrupted by an impromptu Christmas party).
One of the other main characters on the show was Beckett (Michael Boatman), who worked in the morgue at China Beach. In this episode, he helps a recently introduced character, “Frankie” Bunsen (Nancy Giles), as she is temporarily assigned to the morgue with him for an episode (there’s a good bit where he tells her to alter all dates of deaths to December 26th, as no one dies on Christmas in Vietnam).
Like most episodes of the series, everything was very well-written, and a mixture of bitter and sweet (there’s the bitterness of the soldiers who want to know if they can get the Bob Hope ticket that their buddy had on him when he was shot, but also the sweetness of all of the soldiers who won’t leave their buddies’ side for the holidays, and, of course, McMurphy and Richard’s relationship is always fun).
Nan Woods played Cherry White, a Red Cross volunteer (termed “Donut Dollies,” after how they would hand out donuts in World War II. They didn’t do doughnuts in Vietnam, as it was too hot), who was naive, but was also in Vietnam looking for her MIA brother. Woods, who had only started acting four years earlier (when she was 18), no longer wanted to continue acting, and she was allowed to leave soon after this, with her character killed off a few episode later, at which point she retired from acting.
This was Wells’ big break as a writer, and he was the showrunner by the end of the series, and he did a GREAT job. He later got to be the showrunner on ER, where he brought director Mimi Leder with him, and she became a superstar on ER, winning Emmy’s, and becoming a director of movie blockbusters. Wells brought other China Beach writers with him to ER, like Lydia Woodward and Carol Flint. He also brought over Troy Evans from this series to ER (where he played the lovably grumpy Frank).
If you have a suggestion for a notable 1980s TV Christmas episode, drop me a line at brian@poprefs.com!
