Welcome to Attention Matters, the newsletter from Storythings which gives you practical insights and tools on how to tell better stories and grow your audiences’ attention.
Hello!
In our last newsletter, I wrote about the three kinds of creative friction — good, bad and hidden. I mentioned that this distinction matters most when you move from campaigns to formats: a podcast series, a video show, or a weekly newsletter. A campaign will just about manage to absorb friction until it’s over, because it has a full stop when everyone can catch their breath and take stock. A format doesn't - whatever friction you have on episode one, you'll either have to fix it, or see it again on episode two, twenty, and two hundred.
I’ve worked in creative media for over 30 years, so have had to deal with friction in lots of different contexts, from making public interactive art in city streets to setting up live streams for Big Brother. I’ve seen a lot of different kinds of friction, so I thought it’d be worth picking out a few examples from different sectors, and see what we can learn from them for our B2B content workflows.
This week, I’ve picked one of the most nerve-wracking and stressful things I’ve ever done - working as part of a live TV broadcast. When I was at Channel 4 in the mid 2000s working with the multi-platform team, I would spend my evenings sat at home, hunched over a laptop, constantly checking that the interactive experiences we’d built for programmes like Million Pound Drop or Big Brother were coping with the impact of huge audiences hitting them at exactly the same time. There is no stress quite like it - the knowledge that you’re doing something that is going out live, right this second, to millions of people, so any mistakes you make are instantly viewable to everyone.
There are two great projects that really capture what it feels like to work on live TV, both based on the same show - Saturday Night Live. The first, 30 Rock, is one of my all time favourite sitcoms, and the second - Saturday Night, is a fantastically nervy and stressful feature film about the first ever episode of SNL in 1975.
Both create narrative tension from the pressure to put out a live show, and this constraint is why SNL — and its new UK version — are such useful case studies for anyone running a recurring content formats. Between them, they show how the same live deadline can generate all three kinds of friction at once. As a bonus, a brilliant analysis from comedy writer Joel Morris has given me another insight from the UK version of SNL into how to resolve creative friction. But before we get to that, here’s what SNL can teach us about Good, Bad and Hidden friction.
Good friction: the deadline that can't move
Broadcasting live at a set time is an excellent, if extreme, example of good friction. It is friction that sits inside the creative problem. Writers can't endlessly polish a sketch; they have to decide, this week, what's actually funny, and make that decision quickly. Tina Fey has talked about that deadline as a lesson in not being precious — you improve a joke until the last possible second, then you let it go:
The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s eleven-thirty. This is something that Lorne Michaels has said often about Saturday Night Live, and it’s a great lesson in not being too precious about your writing. You have to try your hardest to be at the top your game and improve every joke until the last possible second, but then you have to let it go.
For a B2B podcast or video series, your version of "11:30" might be a fixed recording day, a hard word count, or a rule that every episode has to answer one specific audience question. The question Tina Fey discusses above is similar to the one I suggested in the last newsletter - is this friction making the work harder, or making the team think harder? A hard deadline usually does the second, and this kind of good creative friction will make your workflow more effective.
Bad friction: what gets in the way of hitting 11:30
Bad friction is everything that isn't the creative problem itself — chasing a guest's publicist, waiting on legal sign-off for a sponsor read, five stakeholders disagreeing on the intro. In 30 Rock, the comedic tension in the show is created through Tina Fey’s character Liz Lemon having to cope with the competing egos of the show’s stars, her corporate boss, and the writing and production teams. I don’t think I’ve ever identified with a meme more than this one from 30 Rock:
When you’re running a regular format, this kind of bad friction compounds. A five-day approval delay on episode one is annoying. The same delay on episode fifteen means your format simply can't run reliably. Remember in our last edition when I suggested mapping out your production timeline to understand points of friction? If you’re having trouble with a long-running series, try the same exercise for your last three episodes, not just one — bad friction in a format often only becomes visible when you can see it as a recurring pattern.
Hidden friction: what the deadline pushes downstream
This is where the SNL case study gets really interesting. The live deadline is good friction for the show's creative quality — but it also generates tonnes of hidden friction for the people making it. If a sketch gets cut at dress rehearsal, someone has just lost hours of work that the audience never sees, and the decision-maker who cut it may never register the cost. This friction is what drives the narrative and comedic friction in both 30 Rock and Saturday Night. In 30 Rock, Liz Lemon continually tries to resolve her problems through delegation, but they go even further off track and end up coming back to bite her. She’s just trying to be a good manager and producer, but all of her decisions just create more friction.
This is the pattern to watch for in a recurring format: the thing that makes episode-by-episode quality good is often the exact thing that burns out the team making it. A hard weekly cadence is good friction for the audience, but it can create hidden friction for whoever's absorbing the extra hours to deliver it. So the diagnostic question for a format isn't just "who is paying for this decision," from last time — it's "is our good friction becoming someone's hidden friction?"
Bonus insight - Momentum is what carries you through the friction
The comedy writer Joel Morris recently wrote about going to watch SNL UK being recorded, and he landed on something that isn't in the good/bad/hidden framework at all. His theory for why the format finally works in Britain, after thirty years of failed attempts, is that it's not just a comedy show, but a gig, something closer to the history of music hall. During SNL, he band plays continuously — through ad breaks, through set changes, while the cast get their makeup done. It’s the constant thread that creates momentum through the show, for both the audience and the production team.
That matters because a lot of what happens backstage at SNL is still genuinely difficult, fast, operational work — stagehands build a whole set in three minutes flat while a clock counts down. That's real friction, and none of it goes away because there's a band playing. What the music does is stop that friction from ever being felt as a gap. The energy carries straight through the seam. The audience never senses the scramble, and — this is the part that matters for creative teams — neither does the cast. They're singing along while their makeup is being applied.
That's worth adding to your format alongside good, bad and hidden friction: give the format momentum. Something consistent — a theme, a recurring segment, a host's opening ritual, a visual signature — that carries the audience and the team through the seams where your production friction actually lives.
Formats that feel effortless on the surface usually aren't effortless for the team producing them. They've just understood where their hidden friction is, and built something that gives them the momentum to carry them through it.
Four things to check on your own formats
Bad friction: Map your last three episodes side by side. Where does the same delay show up each time? That's a workflow problem, not a one-off.
Good friction: Name your format's "11:30." What's the one constraint you should never soften, because it's what makes the format sharp?
Hidden friction: Ask the team, not the stakeholders: what's the thing you quietly do every episode to make the deadline work, that nobody upstream has ever asked about?
Momentum: What's the one consistent element — a segment, a sound, a rhythm — that carries your format through its own seams, so the audience, and your team, never feel the gap?
Formats live or die on repetition, so the friction you carry into episode two is the friction you'll be carrying at episode two hundred. It’s worth finding that friction and the momentum that will carry you through it, as early as you can.
Thanks for reading, and if you’d like advice on friction in your content formats, I’d love to talk - just hit reply and we can set up a call!
Matt
