It started with the (faux-reality masquerading as “real” reality) Reality Show.

Here, ostensible strangers were forced to interact with each other while viewers at home watched what they could otherwise watch by sitting on their balconies. Behind the scenes, producers were picking people whose preferences, backgrounds, and beliefs would cause fireworks, thereby undercutting what little “reality” existed in the constrained confines of the show’s own reality. This was entertainment.

Then, producers went a step further. Enter American Idol and the like. In this, producers were looking for more “reality”. Not in the sense of fooling viewers into thinking that what they were watching was reality, but by making them apart of the created reality. Now, real people were performing for you. Their success or failure, as the producers pounded into your head, was up to you. By voting for the individual that appealed to you most, it was as if you really were choosing who would win.

Recently, entertainment ideas have taken a turn — enter Snakes on a Plane (SOAP). By this method, a clique of small, driven fans (fans meeting to celebrate the idea of some piece of entertainment that they foresee themselves enjoying and obsessing over some time in the future) drives the actual outcome of the movie. The fans, in seeking out like-minded individuals, actually direct the path of a production.

In all this, there’s a common theme: If a producer can get more people to tell them what they want to see, then the product produced should necessarily succeed. Instead of leaving your work to be judged by the throes of the market, producers reason, you instead let those participating in the market tell you directly what they want. Price signals and purchasing trends, aside. No need to use them; their incomplete signals.

But, as appears to be the case with SOAP, success can’t be guaranteed before the material has been produced. You can’t produce something based on the hyped up demands of a few, expecting the preferences of a small sample to conform to the whole. As producers strive to connect more and more to the individual preference, they’ll find that too much democracy is a bad thing.

Colbert’s insight into this phenomenon might just get him a bridge.