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Notes -
The news is lying again!
Not directly of course. Indirectly, and ya I know it's not really a surprise. But I like Scott's approach to lying, "if it's worth your time to lie it's worth my time to correct you".
In this case, my newsfeed got clogged up with articles about the bad bunny halftime show because I was looking up reactions to it after some of the previous TheMotte discussions. One of the lines repeated in just about every article was that bad bunny was the most viewed half time show in all history. Which immediately struck me as disingenuous.
First of all none of them meant "most viewed at the time of airing". It's based on playback data after the fact. Usher and Kendrick Lamar both had more viewership during the performance. This is a bad metric for multiple reasons. Viewership generally goes up over time. Internet viewership of things has definitely gone up. None of the articles I saw gave relative numbers on this, so I don't even know how much of a success this should be. It would be like judging star wars movie success by how many people watched on the first week of the theater release, and not adjusting at all for more theaters/people/etc.
Second of all the in moment halftime show viewership is generally a function of how many people are watching the Superbowl. The halftime show does create a viewership bump as some people tune in for it specifically. I think this viewership bump is actually more important than total viewership of the halftime show. The viewership bump makes the Superbowl more of a cultural moment. The "cultural moment" is what makes the Superbowl such a commercial success.
The metric that I think we should judge halftime shows on is the relative viewership bump as a percentage and not absolute numbers. Since viewership has generally been going up year over year for the event.
The bulleted data below was put together by Gemini AI, using methodology I requested. Basically how much viewership was bumped by the halftime show:
By this metric I think bad bunny was a failure. In the 2010s a 1-3% bump was standard. Lady Gaga was an outlier during that era.
Third and final point is: stop trying to make fetch happen. I've lived most of my adult life in a media environment where they can just endlessly repeat something in order to make it true. I'm sick of it. I think most people are sick of it.
They want to manifest cultural items into success, and they use the fudgiest numbers and lying stats to make it part of the narrative.
They couldn't manifest the woke tv shows to success, and they aren't doing it here either.
What does that mean?
It's a reference to the film Mean Girls. A character is trying to encourage the use of 'fetch' as a slang term, meaning basically 'good' or 'cool'. Eventually another character angrily shuts her down with, "Stop trying to make fetch happen. It's not going to happen!"
In internet slang today, fetch is basically trying to force a meme artificially, through over-use.
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