Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (film) later inspired a television soap opera in 1967, though without the hyphen in the show's title. A widowed Eurasian doctor Han Suyin (Jones) falls in love with a married-but-separated American correspondent Mark Elliott (Holden) in Hong Kong, during the period of China's Civil War in the late 1940s. Although they briefly find happiness together, she is ostracized by the greater Chinese community. After losing her position at the hospital, Suyin and her adopted daughter go to live with a friend while Mark is on an assignment during the Korean War. They write to each other constantly. She receives word Mark
Love Is a Many Strangled Thing milk?". In its original American broadcast, "Love is a Many Strangled Thing" was viewed by an estimated 6.14 million households, with a 2.8 Nielsen rating and 8% share of the audience between the ages of 18 and 49. This marked a slight rise in the ratings from the previous episode, "A Midsummer's Nice Dream". "The A.V. Club" writer Rowan Kaiser called the episode "solid" commenting that "There was just a consistent stream of amusing lines, steadily increasing in frequency, until I realized that I'd been chuckling essentially from the start of the second act until the end of the fourth".