Turn Around
Take a beat, Broadway.
Tony nominations were announced on Tuesday morning.
By afternoon, the feeds had been hurricaned.
Reaction videos. Graphics. FaceTime clips. Snub recaps. Nominee spotlights. Congratulations carousels. All of it arriving in a flood so dense and fast that by noon, if you’d been following even a handful of Broadway accounts, you’d have consumed more theater content in three hours than most people encounter in six months.
Let’s call all of it Turnaround: content that requires prep—pre-design, scheduling, coordination—and is speedily dispatched to be as timely as possible and maximize reach. In theory.
Turnaround has become the new benchmark for “doing social media right” in the Broadway-sphere. And I don’t say that dismissively. It might actually be right.
But something about this year’s nomination morning made me want to pull on the thread. To look at not just what the machine is doing, but what it’s doing *to us*.
Let’s get into it.
The Flood
First: this isn’t a Broadway thing. It’s an everything thing.
In every corner of entertainment—sports, film, television, music—there is a brand or a channel or an outlet or a person hoping to be the first to take a bite out of whatever cultural cake is being served that hour. The machinery of timely content is not our invention. We are, after all, an industry that still measures success in part by what critics write in newspapers, which is...charming.
But this year confirmed something: most shows, outlets, and agencies have figured out how to get the content machine up and running.
And the machine has specific goals. Producers want attention. Relevance. Heat. The perception that their show is the thing everyone is talking about right now. That desire—especially in awards season, especially on nomination morning—manifests as a need for speed. And so agencies and social teams and graphic designers and video editors go vroom vroom.
Toot toot beep beep.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this. I want to be clear about that. Speed serves a real purpose. The wave when a nomination is new news is short-lived. You catch it or you don’t. The reality is that the campaign starts the moment nominations are announced—voters need to be reached. The case for your show needs to be made while people are listening. I get the logic entirely.
But also, those nominees are real, human, people.
The Morning
This year’s nominees, some of whom are dear friends, were fielding calls as soon as the nomination livestream ended. From outlets wanting quotes. From social teams wanting video. From publicists coordinating next steps. All of it real, all of it legitimate, all of it part of the machinery that exists to amplify this kind of news while it’s still news.
And as I scrolled, I just kept thinking: *I wonder if they’ve had a chance to call their people yet.*
Not their team. Their people. The ones who knew them before any of this. The parent who drove them to rehearsal until they could drive themselves. The friend who talked them out of quitting when it felt like “what’s the point?” The person they went home to after they bombed that callback.
Because what I was watching—and what I think Turnaround, at its most compressed, actually does—is collapse the distance between the moment and the performance of the moment. Between finding out and telling everyone you found out. Between the feeling and the feed.
The Distance
That distance is the space where something metabolizes and becomes yours. The subway ride home after the show. The quiet morning after an opening. The cab ride where you sit in silence (and mute the TV in the taxi). Those pauses, those gaps, are where meaning starts to assemble itself.
When you hand the moment to the machine before it’s had time to become yours, something gets lost. Not the joy. The joy is still real. But the private ownership of the joy. The experience of *knowing* something before it becomes a story about knowing it.
I’m not making a case for logging off. I don’t believe in that as a prescription, and I’m suspicious of anyone who offers it as one. Sharing is not inherently corrosive. Connection is the whole point.
The case I’m making is smaller than that. Just: protect the gap. Even a small one.
The Reach
The machine is optimizing for reach. That’s its job. Reach the voters. Reach the press. Reach the ticket buyers. Do it fast, strike while the iron is hot.
Admittedly, it’s very good at its job. The content that went out on nomination morning was slick, warm, fast, human. Some of it was genuinely smart and beautiful! You can feel the real care that went into it.
But reach and resonance are not the same thing. And the speed that maximizes one can quietly undermine the other.
When everything arrives at once—every show, every nominee, every reaction, every graphic—the sheer volume starts to flatten it. Individual moments blur into a stream of content. The specific person at the center of each of those nominated projects—the one who has been working toward this for years, whose life is genuinely different today than it was yesterday—gets a little harder to see.
But it doesn’t stop with awards season. This is what happens when the distance collapses everywhere, for everyone, all the time. When the instinct to share a moment arrives before the moment itself has had time to register. When the proof of the experience starts to feel more urgent than experiencing the experience.
That’s not a Broadway problem. It’s just where we are.
Turn Around
The people at the center of those nomination-morning graphics—the ones the machine is amplifying—didn’t just wake up that Tuesday and have a thing happen to them. They got there. Years of it. Callbacks they didn’t book. Contracts that were a mess. Roles that went to someone else. Late nights in rehearsal rooms, early mornings at day jobs, the long slow accumulation of trying and trying and trying until one Tuesday morning, a livestream says your name.
That road is the whole story. And nobody sees it in the graphic.
Which is why I think what the moment actually deserves—before the quote, before the video, before the notification hits—is for you to *turn around*. Literally, almost. To face the direction you came from. To see the road that got you there, and all the people who were on it with you, before you start thinking about what comes next or how to share it or what the caption should be.
The machine is already pointed forward. It’s already thinking about reach and timing and what this does for the campaign. That’s its job and it does it well.
But you don’t have to be pointed forward yet. You’ve been pointing forward for years. Just—for a minute—turn around.
That moment, the private one, the one where you actually see and feel what happened to you before it becomes a story about what happened to you—that one only comes once.
And it belongs to you. First.
This week in One last thing: the Tuesday morning I found out I’d been nominated for a Drama Desk Award—and the graphic that was already live before I’d talked to my parents. It’s for paid subscribers ($5/month), which helps keep The Fourth Wall alive and independent. Regardless, thank you for being here.
One last thing…
I found out about the Drama Desk nomination when I opened my eyes last Tuesday morning and Sam said, “you got nominated for a Drama Desk.”
Unbeknownst to sleeping me, my phone had been blowing up with texts from friends and family. And on Instagram—there was a graphic. A few, actually. And when I saw them for the first time, my stomach dropped.
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