EDINBURGH — Francesca Moody has one of the most enviable track records in British theatre, and she insists the secret to it is refusing to chase the thing everyone else in the room is chasing.

Moody, the producer behind Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Fleabag and Richard Gadd's Baby Reindeer, sat down with NPR at the Edinburgh Fringe festival to talk about how she identifies work that will travel far beyond a cramped venue on the city's Royal Mile. Her answer, as NPR framed it, is counterintuitive: the tip for finding a hit is not to look for one.

Her advice, in essence: don't go hunting for the next phenomenon. Go looking for the thing that is unmistakably itself.

A launchpad like no other

The Edinburgh Fringe is the world's largest arts festival, a sprawling, month-long glut of thousands of shows staged in converted pubs, church halls, university rooms and prefabricated tents. It is simultaneously the most democratic and the most brutal marketplace in the performing arts: anyone can perform, and almost everyone loses money.

It is also, historically, the most reliable incubator of talent in the English-speaking world. The festival's alumni include an extraordinary share of the comedy and theatre figures who went on to define their generations, and the economics of the Fringe — small audiences, low budgets, total creative freedom — make it uniquely suited to work that has not yet been sanded down for mass consumption.

That is precisely where Moody operates. Fleabag began as a one-woman show performed by Waller-Bridge at the 2013 Fringe, winning a Foster's Edinburgh Comedy Award before being adapted into the BBC and Amazon series that became a global cultural touchstone. Six years later, Gadd's Baby Reindeer arrived at the same festival, won the Edinburgh Comedy Award, and eventually became one of Netflix's most-discussed releases of 2024.

What she looks for

Moody's method, as she described it to NPR, is less about market analysis than about presence. She is watching for a performer who commands the room on their own terms — someone whose voice is so specific that it cannot be confused with anyone else's. That instinct has repeatedly put her ahead of an industry that tends to wait for consensus before it commits.

The logic holds up commercially as well as artistically. Formats conceived for a single performer in a small room carry unusually low production risk: no ensemble to pay, no set to build, and a script that has already been tested against live audiences night after night. When those shows do translate to television, the underlying intellectual property is cheap to option and the creator is already embedded in it.

It also explains why so much of the most distinctive television of the past decade has traceable roots in Edinburgh. The Fringe functions as a de facto development laboratory that the industry does not have to fund — a point that has grown more pointed as commissioning budgets tighten across British and American networks.

The same story, five headlines

The interview circulated widely this week, picked up by NPR member stations across the United States. Notably, the framing shifted from outlet to outlet even as the substance stayed fixed. NPR's headline emphasized the negative advice — "Don't look for one" — turning the story into a piece about instinct and humility in an industry obsessed with prediction.

Other member-station versions angled toward the producer herself. One promised to explain "how the producer of 'Fleabag' creates hits at the Fringe," framing Moody as an active builder rather than a passive spotter. Another described her as "the producer who turns Edinburgh Fringe productions into hit shows," foregrounding the transformation from small stage to global screen. A fourth kept the simpler formulation: "How the producer of 'Fleabag' finds hits at the Fringe."

The divergence is a small but telling illustration of how the same ten minutes of tape can yield a story about craft, a story about a person, or a story about an industry — depending on which word an editor reaches for first.

Why it resonates now

The timing matters. Baby Reindeer's Netflix adaptation became a genuine phenomenon in 2024, generating intense public debate about its real-life inspirations and the ethics of dramatizing personal trauma. Fleabag, meanwhile, has settled into the canon, regularly cited among the defining television works of its era. Two global hits from one producer's slate is a record that invites scrutiny of the method behind it.

Moody's answer — that the search for a hit is self-defeating — sits uneasily with an industry increasingly driven by data, franchise logic and pre-sold intellectual property. If you optimize for the thing that already worked, you arrive late and derivative. If you optimize for the thing that feels singular, you occasionally arrive first, and enormously.

That is a difficult lesson to institutionalize. Fringe success is not easily replicated by algorithm, and the shows that break out are frequently the ones that looked least commercial on paper. But as commissioning budgets shrink and audiences fragment, the case for backing distinct voices early — rather than acquiring them after the fact — becomes harder to argue against.

Moody's own record is the strongest evidence she has. The advice, in the end, is not really about market timing at all. It is about attention: watching the performer in front of you instead of the one you were hoping to see.