what makes a show a hit?
Ross and I were arguing today about what made "Spring Awakening" a hit. Rumor has it that "the internet saved the show" – and I think that’s absurd.
Okay, I’m still on my "Black Swan" kick, and that book laughs at stock market reports that find a simple reason for daily moves – "today the market dropped 100 points over fears about the renewed insurgency in Iraq". Taleb calls it the "narrative fallacy" – the human need to explain things via an unrealistic simple story.
Predicting shows is like predicting the weather or the stock market – there are too many factors to explain it simply. So, the internet may have been a factor, perhaps seriously important, but how can we know that it was the thing that "saved" the show. We know the show worked and we know it had an aggressive web campaign. But there’s no positive evidence of what single factor made it happen.
Falling for the narrative fallacy fools us. If we forget how random show success is, we fall for the producers’ disease and delude ourselves about our projects.