When showing not telling is done well, like Mr Chekhov, then of course it brings writing alive, makes it immediate. But it doesn't always work: particularly when the protagonists are involved in fast-moving, high octane action, it very often doesn't work at all. And you can tell these poor souls who’ve been on writing courses and had it drummed into them: “Show not tell, show not tell…” till they’re too petrified to tell the reader anything at all, and we’re left groping in the dark.
What just happened? Um... well, the protagonist seemed to get hurt – heard something –  saw something flash by – and her vision went  blurry, but, er...
Re-read. And re-read. And read on. And finally work it out… by which time, flow has been lost and you’re incredibly irritated. Why couldn’t you just say she got knocked on the head?
Because that author thinks they can’t. It’s not allowed. It’s – oh no – bad writing.
You can even go online now and find banks of “show not tell” phrases for demonstrating a character’s emotions. For instance:
 
“her eyes widened” = surprise
“he folded his arms and scowled” = angry
 
and so on and so on. I find that bizarre and yet curiously interesting. The point of show not tell, surely at least in part, is to make things immediate and fresh. If you need to lift phrases like the above from a word bank, you are immediately:

• deep into cliché, and not fresh at all
• possibly autistic. Who needs a checklist to make sure people’s eyes widen in surprise?

​The failure of Divergent vs Hunger Games
(I’m going to use the movies and the books interchangeably here: they tell the same story – or lack thereof – and the final movie in the Divergent series never got made.)
 
Why did Divergent not go the course?
The short answer is, that movie number two (Insurgent) sucked but we all went to see it anyway, cos movie number one (Divergent) was pretty decent with some interesting visuals (dystopian City of Chicago, high speed train, flying fox over cityscape spring to mind) and a fine lead in Shailene Woodley. Number two did pretty well at the box office because we were all ready and willing to go see it after number one: the producers foolishly decided to pay attention to box office ratings rather than how people actually felt about the movie, and on the back of this split book number three, a la Harry Potter, Twilight, Hunger Games, into two movies… but no one bothered to go to number three, cos two was so rubbish.
So, number three failed catastrophically, and number four never got made.
 
Why did movie number two (Insurgent) fail? Not box office, but as a movie.
I could talk about the implausibility of the basic premise (everyone is one of five simplistic personality types, and has to stick to that caste for life); plus any number of characterisation/psychology flaws that grew more obvious and annoying as the story progressed – but I won’t, because I suspect a lot of the target readership/audience was happy to overlook that stuff.
But what they couldn’t overlook – though maybe they didn’t understand the basic problem – was the failure of story.
The fact is, number one worked perfectly well as a stand-alone. At the end of Divergent, Tris and 4 have basically foiled the plot of evil clever-caste woman Kate Winslett, stopped the soldier-caste from carrying out her plans for city-wide domination through a kind of drugged/implanted hypnosis, and balance consequently should have been restored.
But – Tris and 4 choose to run away, as if still on the run. Why? The soldier-caste was acting under duress to carry out Winslett’s plans: as Tris and 4 got rid of the duress, Winslett should have been toothless and beaten. She no longer had a docile army carrying out her evil will. Victory was Tris’s, but she ran away – obviously so the author could manufacture another book in the series. But the subsequent books didn’t work. For that very reason: basically, the plot was already fully resolved.
As a stand-alone, Divergent worked well. Beyond that, it had nowhere to go.
 
By comparison – Hunger Games did string out the finale into two movies, so number three dragged a little – it was basically just filler while we waited for number four – but the plot had to happen: it had inevitablity, that final confrontation between good and evil, killing the monster President Snow (plus twist) as Mr Booker would theorize.
 
And Harry Potter is crafted by a plotting whizz: JK is the grand master of complex plot chess. Six novels of increasing hugeosity, but everything that happens is consistent, mysteries within mysteries, wheels within wheels, powerful characterization and growth, and it all moves towards the inevitable massive climactic confrontation between the good of Hogwarts and evil of Voldemort.

​For me, the best way to think about story is to think about example narratives that really work. Stephen Pressfield
https://stevenpressfield.com/2019/02/the-understory-2/
uses the first Bourne movie as a brilliant example (ps I wouldn’t call it the understory: it is simply the story, what gives the movie its narrative drive. Without this mystery, the movie would be a series of disconnected incidents. Serial events are not story).
When Bourne, the mystery man fished out of the Mediterranean one stormy night with total amnesia, is picked up by police as an itinerant on a Zurich midwinter park bench, he flips, knocks them cold in micro-seconds and disarms them. I remember this scene well, the first time I saw the movie: it is breathtaking in its intensity, and the emotion it engenders in the viewer. Instantly we know what we suspected: that Bourne is no ordinary man. That his amnesia is due to some deeply traumatic event. That he is a man of violence, and there are dark and turbulent events in his past. That he needs to find out who he really is, before that past can catch up with him…
That is the problem before us. The inciting incident, I suppose, has already happened: Bourne has apparently been shot and tossed or fallen overboard from some anonymous vessel. But the real mystery now, is his identity. And we are desperate to find out, to follow his journey (Matt Damon is a brilliant actor, understated but we root for him so much). And then it is given increasing urgency (raising the stakes relentlessly) by the fact that he is being pursued.