I've had the novel of Catch-22 by my bedside since the late 80s, probably read it through at least a dozen times. I had the Mike Nichols movie on VHS and probably watched it at least 50 times over the years. Despite having read the book and watched the movie so many times, it is one of those works in which one can find something new that they never noticed before. Amazingly, I not only never saw this pilot, I never knew there WAS a pilot made and it actually aired on network tv in 1973. The jokey approach of the adaptation, combined with the canned laughter, makes for quite a shock to my sensibilities given my familiarity with Joseph Heller's work and the movie adaptation. I imagine that the sitcom version would be a confusing mess to an audience unfamiliar with the source material. Clunky exposition and the hamfisted acting is really weird, but given the fact the producers were trying to recreate the unexpected success of the movie and subsequent adaptations of M*A*S*H, they obviously either didn't understand or were unable to capture the black comedy of the book and movie of Catch-22. Nobody can guess what would have happened had this show been picked up, but we can probably speculate that if it had, Dreyfuss wouldn't have been cast on JAWS. This pilot is posted to YouTube and even though it is totally goofy and really misses the point of the book, I recommend watching it if you too are a fan.