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May 1

Special format episodes

Growing up, one of my favourite shows was M*A*S*H and some of my favourite episodes of that series were the ones where the format was played around with for dramatic effect. There's not necessarily a hard line between "normal" episodes and the episodes I'm talking about, but examples would include the various "letter home" episodes, of which Dear Dad was the first (in season 1, airing in 1972), The Interview, which was filmed as a B&W newsreel, Life Time, which ran in "real time", complete with stop watch, and my personal favourite, Dreams, which looked at each character's nightmares. My specific question is this: was MASH the first show to make use of such special episodes - and, if not, what was?
More generally, I'd like to know if anyone has written about the phenomenon from a critical standpoint. It seems to me that there are a few different flavours of such episodes, from odd themes to complete temporary re-characterizations. Just to be clear, I'm not talking about "Very special episodes", which shoe-horned in politically driven "messages" in place of normal story-lines. Matt Deres (talk) 19:39, 1 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Many shows have dream episodes. I searched List of I Love Lucy episodes for "dream" and found List of I Love Lucy episodes#ep144 which says it also added musical numbers. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:26, 2 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you both. I had never heard of "bottle episode" before; it's clearly a variety of show like what I'm after. Lucy pre-dates the MASH instance by 16-odd years. Can we find anything earlier (or other early ones)? Matt Deres (talk) 23:23, 2 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]