I want to share with you, readers, something in which I’ve been deeply in love with for a while now. Even before this position at Hii, where, as the creative editor, I help with sharing stories about sound, I knew that I wanted to eventually write about this topic. I’ve already spent numerous hours evangelizing about it to friends, strangers at parties, and in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, anyone I sense would benefit from experiencing it. With our current global reality feeling wildly eventful, usually erring toward the side of trauma, our increased time spent on the internet, in addition to constantly taking in information and having to process it, I want to spread the good word of Slow TV, because I can sense that you, reader, may also benefit from it.

Slow TV is a term coined by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK). It describes a genre of television programming that can be broadly defined as long tapings of slow paced material. The genre grew in popularity in 2009 when the NRK broadcasted a seven-hour train ride from Bergern to Oslo that was viewed by 20% of Norway, around 1.2 million people. (Link). This was impressive enough that the broadcast company decided to try it again with a 134 hour broadcast of a Norwegian coastal voyage called the Hurtigruten. This garnered nearly 6 million viewers across 148 countries, plus a Guinness Book of World Records credit as the longest documentary made. (Source). Here’s a sped up recap of that broadcast. After this, Norway blew the lid off Slow TV, programming spectacularly “boring” events like 14 hours of Birdwatching, 18 hours of salmon fishing, 12 hours of boat riding and 8 hours of knitting. These long broadcasts of prosaic activities continued to be received well while bolstering up the catalogue for the niche genre.

My first foray into Slow TV wasn’t through Norwegian television but on the internet, while in search of something to put on while working. From my experience in various music studios, usually windowless where all sense of time is lost, I learned to put on soundless visual stimuli, if there’s a television, to encourage attentiveness and possibly inspire creativity. When working with others or late at night on my own, I’d soundlessly air anything from soccer, anime to animal documentaries while writing or mixing to avoid the sleepy pitfalls of such insular and oftentimes repetitive work. At some point, it struck me to do the same with non-musical work as well, but I found that much of the programming that worked with the sound off, would oftentimes keep my attention with sound on. I had to start to define characteristics that were conducive to me working and one of the first concepts that made sense to me was industrial sounds. I concluded that factory and industrial sounds, already tied to productivity, would encourage my own. I searched and found a series of videos of cars being built in factories that fit the bill. (Link)

Sorting through options on Youtube, I defined a core characteristic for what would work, for me, as slow TV content: no non-diegetic sounds. Versions of the car factory videos with music would pull my focus from my work. Any sound that doesn’t exist in the world of the video would draw my attention, due to my conditioning of needing to know what’s going on the screen, reinforced by audio strategies narrative television / commercials use to grab viewers attentions, like a jumpscare in horror films. Even something like Mac DeMarco’s long form video series, CAM TONY (Link), which follows him writing music, still works for me as its all sounds coming from the world. No sounds are added after the fact and the subject here isn’t concerned with capturing the viewers attention, Mac simply documents what he’s doing and presents that, much like the 134 hour boat broadcast.

Iterations of Slow TV reach back to the beginning of film as a medium. The Lumiere brothers’ first works, including Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, are called “actualities”, an early version of documentary, because they similarly depict everyday events occurring over time. A significant difference to Slow TV however, is context (people were captivated by this new medium so “mundane” activities were interesting enough to watch) and sound - usually bar piano or some form of live music was played in real time to these pictures because the technology to record and playback sound in time with the images hadn’t caught up yet.

In the liner notes of Ambient Music 1: Music for Airports (1978), producer-composer Brian Eno describes the genre of music he coined by saying “Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting” (Link). Slow TV’s relationship to traditional television programming can be compared to the relationship between pop music, with its tendency to create narrative arcs through structure, and ambient music, where its intent is often being supported by sustained notes or less focused harmonic movement. As a musician, music can hard for me to listen to while working on other tasks, I can’t always zone it out and not listen with a critical ear: whether that be taking in the arrangement, having my interest piqued by unexpected harmonic movements, etc. I find ambient music or Slow TV to be viable options to work next to, much like a friend working across the table from me, encouraging but not (usually) distracting. This need for non-musical ambience seems to be universal currently, with websites popping up to simulate coffee shop environments, bar environments and even offices; important when much of the workforce has been restricted to home.

Slow TV is effective outside of the bounds of productivity too. The Mac Demarco series or this long video of wagyu steak being cooked, work as sources of comfort, similar to ASMR, because of the pacing and the focus on pleasing, sounds, but also, I believe, because videos like these tap into an innocuously voyeuristic tendency of watching people do things without the pressure of being observed. Humans are strange and unique creatures and sometimes we can forget it's a delight to just watch each other do our things. Imagine people-watching without the worry of being perceived. There are whole communities dedicated to niche, long form videos like pilots starting up airplanes; the clicks, toggles and radio sounds that occur aurally bring calm and there’s a sense of comfort in the unexceptional procedure. That added pleasure of unraveling the curtain on this niche job makes it even more enjoyable to come in and out of videos like this. Interesting enough but it doesn’t demand your attention.

Through the 00s, workplace-based sitcoms like Brooklyn Nine-Nine and The Office, were wildly popular because they also depicted typically everyday environments with expected narrative structures for viewers to follow. I’ve had people in my life exclaim that they will air shows like these in the background to fall asleep to because of the warm feelings these familiar, built worlds provide. Coined “non-event” or “comfort” TV, there’s been a noticeable trend, through streaming, of viewers gravitating towards this type of content, even moreso during the pandemic. Putting on 70 minutes of cows grazing or ‘Jungle Survival’, a YouTube classic showcasing two people building extravagant houses in the middle of an unknown forest, to wind down is unquestionably relaxing.

I would argue that ASMR videos aren’t slow TV. If you recall from Hii’s first external contributor article, Max Alper described ASMR as “the biological pleasure response to intimate aural and visual stimuli”. ASMR differs from Slow TV in that there is a performative aspect that has the audience in mind. Whether boosting higher frequencies on the EQ to actually addressing the audience, ASMR strays against Eno’s description of ambient music/Slow TV being ignorable as it is interesting. ASMR is usually about engaging with viewers versus simply showing an event as it is occurring. This means there’s more of an intent to get your attention, its harder to simply exist along with the content and feel like you’re able to miss things that might happen. The best Slow TV feels like there is a concurrent reality existing on the other side of the screen versus a piece of recorded entertainment trying to vie for your eyeballs. My assertion feels reinforced by the fact that the early Norwegian broadcasts were live, attempting to simply broadcast a linear reality.

Slow TV may not initially make sense to everyone. I’ve certainly received a lot of perplexed reactions when presenting it. However, I think that’s why it has struck a chord with so many viewers, it doesn’t exactly line up with our fast-paced information culture of immediacy. During a TED talk about Slow TV, Thomas Hellum, a project manager at NRK explained that Slow TV, much like a still life painting, allows the viewers to make the stories about the content themselves. Slow TV can be a friend you work alongside at a coffeeshop with, or it can be an exciting event where you’re “waiting for something to happen” or a peak into an interesting and specific hobby / part of the world, but ultimately, by not imposing itself onto the viewer, much like ambient music, Slow TV gives space for you to control what it is for you, which during these chaotic times, is the ultimate comfort.

Spurge's Slow TV Playlist

This articles hero image is from The New Yorker.