One of the nice things about M*A*S*H was that it was quite good at giving assorted guest stars moments to shine. Oh, Jason Bernard was going to get overlooked in his one and only episode of the show, because the other guest star in that episode who might be familiar to you was still-credited-as-Larry Fishburne. (Meaning this is the second time I’ve used a still from this episode as an article image, for those of you keeping count.) And of course Fishburne is excellent on the episode, because Fishburne is always excellent, but Jason Bernard has a quiet wit to him that is memorable if you stop to think about the rest of what’s going on in that episode.
That was a lot of Jason Bernard’s career, really. He’s eighth-billed in While You Were Sleeping, and it’s easy to miss him when he’s trying to be remembered over Sandra Bullock and Peter Boyle and Glynis Johns and so forth. Especially because he’s basically there as a kind of anchor on the story—someone to hold it back from getting too wild by reminding us all that there are, at least in theory, real stakes involved here. He’s there to remind Sandra Bullock’s character that she can’t keep the charade up forever. Because we know that, but at the same time we don’t care who gets hurt, and we need to see that literally anyone cares if she gets hurt.
In what, yes, is old enough so I consider it classic TV, he spent a couple of episodes as Harry’s nemesis on Night Court, a judge who leveled charges of unprofessional behaviour against Harry. Which, you know, it’s kind of hard to argue, though the show was adamant that he was also just a darn good judge. Bernard’s Judge Willard found Harry frustrating because Harry didn’t take himself or the job as seriously as Judge Willard felt they should be taken. Not that he thinks Harry himself deserves to be taken seriously, but he does believe a judge should be taken seriously as a person and as an officer of the court.
What happens a lot in what I’ve seen of his career is that goings-on go on around him. He’s played various judges, police officers, and military figures. He was quite good at that aura of quiet authority, and he was a heck of a straight man when that was what was required of him. However, he was often the kind of straight man who got in a zinger when the occasion arose. He gets to put down Charles on his M*A*S*H episode, which is always welcome and usually deserved. He’s not necessarily an actor you remember off the top of your head, but it’s nice when he appears.
He actually died in a way similar to how a high school friend of mine did—he had a heart attack while driving. My friend, fortunately for all concerned, was at a stoplight at the time, but it seems that Bernard was then rear-ended and was pronounced dead at the hospital an hour later. That’s one of those situations where you can’t help feeling sorry for the person in the other car; bad enough to hit someone who was having a heart attack, but how much worse to discover that it was a minor character actor who’d been in some solid classics?
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