There was a night in Vienna, early in my performing life, when I watched my audience evaporate. Not physically — they were still sitting there. But I could see their attention leave the room, person by person, like watching lights go off in an apartment building. First the people in the back rows. Then the middle. Then even the front row, who had been genuinely engaged three minutes earlier, started glancing at their phones.
I was in the middle of a mentalism piece that required setup. Not a long setup — maybe ninety seconds of explaining the conditions, establishing the fairness, building the framework. Ninety seconds. In the world of traditional magic performance, ninety seconds of setup is nothing. Performers from previous generations routinely spent three or four minutes establishing the premise of an effect before anything happened.
But this was not a previous generation. This was a room full of professionals in their thirties and forties who had grown up with the internet, who consumed content on platforms where a three-second pause causes viewers to swipe away, who processed information at a pace that would have been unimaginable when the classic magic literature was written.
Ninety seconds of setup was an eternity. And I lost them.
The Analogy That Changed My Thinking
When I read Scott Alexander’s notes on building a stand-up act, he made an observation that reframed everything I thought about pacing. He described the modern television news screen — the kind with an anchor talking in the main frame, a field reporter in a picture-in-picture box, a scrolling ticker at the bottom, a weather graphic in the corner, and breaking news alerts sliding across the top. Multiple streams of information, all running simultaneously, all being processed by the viewer at the same time.
This, Alexander argued, is what modern audiences are trained to handle. Decades of media consumption have wired our brains for multi-stream information processing. We are not just capable of handling rapid input — we expect it. When a single stream of information moves too slowly, our cognitive system starts looking for additional streams to fill the bandwidth. In a magic show, that means the audience starts processing their own thoughts, their phones, their conversations with neighbors — anything to fill the processing gap left by a show that is not keeping up with their capacity.
This is not a criticism of modern audiences. It is a description of a real cognitive shift that has occurred across generations. People who grew up watching television process visual information differently than people who grew up with radio. People who grew up with smartphones process information differently than people who grew up with television. The substrate has changed, and the performance must change with it.
What Fast Processing Actually Means
I want to be precise about what this means in practice, because it is easy to misinterpret the TV news principle as “do everything faster.” That is not the point. The point is about density of engagement, not speed of execution.
Modern audiences do not need you to do things faster. They need every moment to justify its existence. There can be no dead time — no moments where the audience is waiting for you to get to the point, set up the next prop, remember what comes next, or fill space with meaningless patter. Every second must deliver something: information, emotion, humor, mystery, visual interest, or dramatic tension.
This is a higher standard than performers faced thirty years ago. A generation ago, an audience would grant a performer a certain amount of patience. They understood that a live show had a different rhythm than television. They were willing to wait during transitions, forgive minor dead spots, and trust that the performer would eventually get to the good part.
That patience has been significantly reduced. Not eliminated — live audiences are still more patient than online audiences, which is why live performance remains viable. But the margin is thinner. The amount of dead time an audience will tolerate before their attention starts to drift is shorter than it used to be.
Where I Was Getting It Wrong
After the Vienna incident, I went through my show piece by piece, not looking at the effects themselves, but at the spaces between them. The transitions. The setups. The explanations. The moments where I was talking but nothing was happening.
What I found was alarming. In a thirty-minute set, I had roughly six minutes of dead time. Six minutes where the audience was not experiencing magic, comedy, emotion, or visual interest. Six minutes of setup, transition, prop management, and explanatory patter that served the performer’s needs (setting up the next effect) rather than the audience’s experience.
Six minutes is twenty percent of a thirty-minute show. Twenty percent of the time, the audience was waiting for something to happen. And in a world where twenty percent dead time means losing forty percent of the audience’s attention, that ratio was destroying my show from the inside.
The individual effects were strong. The transitions were killing them.
The Audit Process
I developed a process that I still use, borrowing from my consulting background. I call it the engagement audit, and it works like this.
Record your show. Watch it back with a timer. Every time you see a moment where the audience would not be experiencing one of the three core reactions — rapt attention, laughter, or astonishment — mark it. Note the duration. At the end, add up all the marked moments.
That total is your dead time. And your goal is to reduce it as close to zero as possible.
Some dead time is unavoidable. You need transitions. You need moments of setup. But the question for each of those moments is: can this moment also deliver engagement? Can the transition double as a joke? Can the setup double as a story? Can the prop management happen while you are saying something that holds the audience’s attention?
The answer, in almost every case, is yes. But it requires scripting. It requires thinking about every moment of the show as a performance moment, not just the effects. The spaces between effects are performance moments too. They either build engagement or they bleed it.
How I Restructured
The restructuring happened in phases. The first phase was the easiest: eliminating dead time that was simply unnecessary. Setups that were too long. Explanations that repeated themselves. Transitions where I walked to a table, picked up a prop, walked back, and then started talking. Every one of these could be compressed, combined, or eliminated.
The second phase was harder: making necessary dead time engaging. I needed transitions between effects. I could not eliminate them entirely. But I could fill them with content. A joke during a prop switch. A question to the audience while setting up the next piece. A brief, compelling story that carried the audience’s attention from one effect to the next.
The third phase was the most profound: restructuring the effects themselves to eliminate internal dead time. Many of my routines had moments of procedure — “now I am going to do this, and then you are going to do that, and then we will see what happens.” These procedural moments are necessary for the effect to work, but they do not need to be presented procedurally. They can be embedded in stories. They can be disguised as audience interaction. They can be compressed through clearer instructions.
After this restructuring, my dead time dropped from six minutes to about ninety seconds. And the difference in audience engagement was immediately obvious. The show felt tighter. The energy held better between effects. The audience’s attention did not drift during transitions because the transitions were not empty.
The Generational Divide
I want to address something that comes up when I discuss this with other performers. Some of them push back. They say that audiences should learn to be patient. That the art of magic has always included moments of buildup and anticipation. That slowing down is part of the craft.
They are not wrong about the art. Great magic does include buildup and anticipation. A well-placed pause before a reveal is one of the most powerful tools in performance. Rushing through a show robs the audience of the dramatic tension that makes climaxes feel climactic.
But there is a critical difference between deliberate pacing and dead time. A pause before a reveal is deliberate pacing — it builds tension. The audience is fully engaged during that pause because they are anticipating what comes next. That is not dead time. That is one of the most alive moments in the entire show.
Dead time is when the audience is not anticipating anything. When they are waiting, not for a reveal, but for the performer to get organized. When they are listening to an explanation that does not engage them emotionally or intellectually. When nothing is happening that serves their experience.
The TV news principle does not demand that you eliminate pauses or rush through effects. It demands that you eliminate the moments that serve no one. That you respect the audience’s time and cognitive capacity by ensuring that every second of the show is doing something for them.
What This Means for Show Structure
The TV news principle has practical implications for how you structure a show. Here are the ones I have found most important.
Front-load the engagement. The first sixty seconds of your show establish the audience’s expectations for pacing. If those sixty seconds are packed with engagement, the audience calibrates to that pace and will stay with you through natural moments of lower intensity. If those sixty seconds include dead time, the audience calibrates to that lower standard and will check out earlier.
Make transitions invisible. The ideal transition is one the audience does not notice. They are so engaged by what you are saying or doing during the transition that they do not realize you have moved from one effect to the next. This requires scripting the transitions as carefully as you script the effects.
Respect the audience’s processing speed. When you give instructions to a volunteer, be clear and brief. When you explain the conditions of an effect, use the minimum words necessary. When you set up a premise, get to the interesting part fast. The audience will process your information faster than you expect, and if you repeat yourself or over-explain, they will feel like you are wasting their time.
Vary the type of engagement, not just the level. The TV news principle is not just about speed. It is about variety of input. An audience that is receiving the same type of engagement — verbal patter, for instance — will habituate faster than an audience that is receiving varied types: some verbal, some visual, some musical, some interactive, some contemplative.
The Counterpoint
I realize there is a tension between this post and the previous one. Yesterday I wrote about peaks and valleys — the need for quiet moments that create contrast. Today I am writing about the TV news principle — the need for constant engagement. These seem contradictory. A valley, by definition, is a lower-energy moment. How can it also be a moment of full engagement?
The answer is that energy level and engagement level are not the same axis. A quiet, low-energy musical number can be completely engaging. A soft personal story can hold rapt attention. A gentle moment of interaction with a single audience member can be one of the most riveting parts of the show. These are valleys in energy but peaks in engagement.
Dead time is low energy and low engagement. That is the problem. The TV news principle is about eliminating the moments that are both quiet and empty. It is not about eliminating quietness. It is about ensuring that every moment — loud or quiet, fast or slow, funny or serious — is doing something meaningful for the audience.
The modern audience will follow you anywhere if every step of the journey matters. They will stay with a three-minute quiet passage if that passage is earning their attention. What they will not tolerate is being asked to wait while you prepare to earn their attention.
That distinction — between a valley that engages and dead time that empties — is the key to performing for the generation raised on multi-stream information. They are brilliant audiences. Fast, perceptive, emotionally sophisticated. They deserve shows that respect what they are capable of processing.
Give them that, and they will give you something invaluable in return: their undivided attention.