J. Pierpont Morgan observed, in one of his analytical interludes, that a person usually has two reasons for doing a thing: one that sounds good and a real one.
Instead of presenting a full story from start to finish, most evenings consisted of just the high points with enough narrative and acrobatic interludes to help it all hang together.
There was no need to mess it up with bells and whistles, although I did add a number of epistolary interludes (passages from fictional books, a diary entry, letters, teletype bulletins) between narrative segments.