How We Plotted Stories on MASH Link

From Ken Levine, one of the writers for the series MASH:

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.

I grew up watching MASH with out any real sense of that war. I just knew that it was good story telling. The formula was pretty obvious even then, but it worked better than almost any other weekly show at the time. It still holds the record for the most watched single episode on TV.