By Christopher Ross
Few people dispute the effectiveness of storytelling. Whether it’s an anecdote of how a story silenced a room filled with people, or how neuroscientists use MRI’s to demonstrate how our brains light up and react to stories. From Harvard Business Review to independent labs, there is a tremendous amount of research underway to continue to explain the efficacy of stories. However, I would suggest this is something we intuitively understand because there is a very simple explanation: A good story can capture an audience.
Yet there is even something more basic at work. Stories can feed a need. A compelling story, especially a great fictional story, can be the perfect diversion to all that is going on in the world today. Perhaps that’s why for the past two years in a row, adult non-fiction book sales are up. And live action miniseries are on the rise with more and more cable channels like AMC and FX and streaming services like Netflix and Amazon entering the space. They are all delivering action and entertainment to a hungry audience that wants a story.
And why not, we all survived an unrelenting bombardment of news during the election season, only to find that as 2017 unfolds, the majority of the news we are consuming continues to be taxing, challenging and vexing. Day in and day out, the steady drip of news feels unrelenting. As Susan Malone says in This Is Why Your Brain Needs A Diversion Right Now, “Have you ever noticed that the more you get caught up in the chaos, the more chaos comes bounding in?”
The distraction of a good story
The challenge is where to turn your attention when you want to relax? The answer for many is to dive into a satisfying story. Nothing provides a better antidote to the news stories today than to turn to a gripping, engaging fictional story. Stories, especially fictional stories, embrace their license to create a narrative that is purely for entertainment, where it is less daunting to decipher who you can trust or what you should believe. While all story genres are great, few would argue that action stories are especially effective at engaging your brain and leveraging all of the audience’s senses.
Perhaps the undisputed king of all action stories today that provides a great diversion and entertains, is HBO’s medieval-fantasy drama series, Game of Thrones (GOT). It is clearly resonating with a huge audience and holds two world records from the Guinness Book of World Records: the most pirated TV program ever, and the largest TV drama simulcast. By the end of its sixth season in 2016, each episode had an average of 25M viewers.
If GOT tells us anything, it’s that the power of a fantastical escape story is undeniable. In 2016, Game of Thrones became the most awarded series in Emmy Awards history. Why? Because GOT is a storyline that follows the traditional hero’s journey, several hero’s as a matter of fact, and it is often challenging to know who the hero is and where their journey will end up. It’s a story that keeps you on your toes and reminds you nothing should be assumed to be off-limits. And it is that unpredictability that keeps the brain so engaged, every cortex lights up and as Paul Zak, a neurologist says, “an amazing neural ballet in which a story line changes the activity of people’s brains” occurs with every episode.
Villains and heroes apply here
What makes GOT particularly satisfying as a diversion, is villains are clearly evil and identifiable. At a time when the news cycles make it impossible to know what you can you trust, it is nice to have some normalcy in terms of your villains and heroes. Few would argue that Cersei Lannister, the Queen Regent of the Seven Kingdoms in the GOT storyline, complete in her flowing robes, long blond hair and soft, almost haunting voice, must be one of the most exquisite female villain on television, even if she is in a mythical medieval period.
So, while all the studies and research are very helpful, they really don’t tell us anything that we don’t already know. We’re all suckers for a good story. With the right amount of narrative or magical intrigue, you can make just about anybody forget the news and noise of the day and lose themselves in a good story!
Boost! Collective is a story-driven marketing and communications firm. We work collaboratively to discover, create and tell the powerful stories that drive deep engagement with your audiences.
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