A fascinating look into the writing processes of one of the most venerated television shows.
For each episode we had two and sometimes three stories. If we had a very dramatic story we would pair it with something lighter. The very first MASH we wrote, Hawkeye was temporally blind and Hawk & Beej pulled a sting on Frank.
We would try to mix and match these story fragments so that they could dovetail or hopefully come together at the end.
All that stuff you probably knew. What you didn’t know is this:
We broke the show down into two acts and a tag. Each act would have five scenes. Brief transition scenes didn’t count. But go back through some episodes. Five main scenes in the first act and five in the second. As best we could we would try to advance both of our stories in the same scenes. But each story is different and we tried to avoid being predictable.
Usually, we wrapped up the heavy story last. That’s the one you cared most about.
The tag would callback something from the body of the show, generally drawing from the funny story.
Since I’m in the middle of plotting out the next sequence of The Winchcombe episodes, this is of significant interest to me.
