Mitchell and Webb sketches didn't age, discovery mechanisms did
The BBC removed 11 Mitchell and Webb sketches from iPlayer because they "don't work today" — revealing how organizations mistake correlation for causation when measuring success.
The corporation followed an obvious-seeming principle of keeping what succeeds now and discarding what fails now. But a sketch with fewer views in 2026 than 2007 hasn't become broken — it's become invisible.
Mitchell and Webb recorded for an era when people actively searched for specific shows on television. Now people scroll Netflix. The content is identical. What deteriorated is the friction between the sketch and how people find it.
Scared Straight made exactly this mistake. The program sent teenagers into prisons to watch inmates. And everyone saw it work spectacularly in the moment. Teens were terrified, sobered, changed. But researchers later found the program increased recidivism. Scaring people into compliance works for stopping them in that room, right now. Backfires when you need them to stay changed once the fear is gone. The program designers saw the immediate effect and stopped thinking.
A comedy sketch doesn't become unfunny because time passed.
”You watch engagement drop and attribute it to content aging. You watch a behavior change and attribute it to your intervention. Neither is necessarily true. What's shifted is the context where the thing lives. Before you delete it or redesign it, ask whether the mechanism itself was ever right for what you were trying to do in the first place. A career stalls not because your approach is broken but because the medium carrying it changed.
