The new era of ‘mindful TV’ is spectacularly banal
The new era of 'mindful TV' is spectacularly banal But its calming nothingness might be exactly what we need Stuart McGurk On America's HBO Max streaming service, the network recently launched a series that is, by some distance, the most star-studded TV show ever to grace the new Hollywood-at-home era.
The first episode boasts Lucy Liu, but that's just the hors d'oeuvre. The third stars Nicole Kidman, the fourth Cillian Murphy, the fifth Keanu freaking Reeves. Others have Idris Elba, Oscar Isaac, Kate Winslet... They even got a double Oscar winner on board: Mahershala Ali. But it's no high-octane drama. In fact, it's anti-octane anti-drama – a "balmer", if you will.
Titled A World Of Calm and made in conjunction with mindfulness app Calm, each half-hour episode transports you to a different ultra-high-def world, as the dulcet tones of an A-lister lulls you into tranquility. Sometimes they take the form of space documentaries, as Elba intones, "Out there, in the galaxy, are endless permutations of texture and form," while we glide through the solar system. Sometimes, they look like crafting how-tos, in which Reeves is no longer murdering for pets but watching a man build a canoe from scratch. In the first episode, Liu glides us through coral reefs, culminating in a sea turtle settling in its own "underwater spa", at which point we're told nine minutes pass between each beat of the turtle's heart. The instruction for the viewer is plain: let's see if you can beat that record.
Clearly, in our locked-down world, we have left the era of "lean-in" TV – those prestige dramas that demand attention and raise blood pressure – and have progressed to the epoch of lean-back, pass-out television. In the UK, the BBC hooked up with the meditation app Headspace to create Mindful Escapes last year on BBC Four: a series of nature documentaries made in conjunction with the broadcaster's Natural History Unit, only without the brutality of nature and the complexity of history. Is it good television? Heavens, no. It's spectacularly banal, but then its banality is the point. Animals aren't killed. Space travel isn't complex. You end the Reeves episode on HBO Max feeling like you could knock up a canoe yourself, if only you could stop yawning.
But it's also the sharp end – or, rather, the softest squidge – of a type of TV that began in the early 2000s and is reaching its zenith at the tail end of Covid. At the end of a day of caged nerves among wearisome walls we need a break, not just from our allotted square footage on the planet, but also from the half square foot in our heads.
Blame The Trip. Seinfeld might have been the first to proclaim itself a "show about nothing", but The Trip took one look at its tightly wound plots and calmly asked it to hold its glass of rosé. We arrived for the impressions, but stayed for the calming sun-kissed shots of clifftop alfresco dining.
When Gone Fishing effectively replaced The Trip in 2018 – a show in which nothing happens apart from two ageing comedians, Bob Mortimer and Paul Whitehouse, trying to catch fish – they could hardly have predicted their 2020 Christmas special would have been roundly proclaimed as the festive highlight. And yet here we are – and it was.
Almost unwittingly, all had stumbled on a new genre. In aiming for realism they gave us something else: relaxing TV, mindful TV, unhurried TV, more about the calming experience of place than the adrenaline rush of plot. The cookery show of the year wasn't Gordon Ramsay expletive-bombing hapless chefs, but The Great British Bake Off or Nigella Lawson's soft-focus Cook, Eat, Repeat. The drama of the year wasn't about police corruption or mafia gangs, but The Queen's Gambit, the story of an undramatic girl playing only mildly dramatic chess. We're no longer hate-watching reality TV stars screech and squabble, we're agreeably tuning in to watch people sew (The Great British Sewing Bee) and make pots (The Great Pottery Throw Down).
And we may not have even reached non-entertainment's nadir. The BBC's Winter Walks is exactly as boring as it sounds. Each week, on BBC Four, a different celebrity armed with a GoPro on a stick simply went for a lovely countryside walk and... well, that's it. I watched Baroness Sayeeda Warsi go for a gentle stroll across the Dales and I enjoyed every mind-numbing minute of it. The show, filmed mostly pre-lockdown, was "ahead of its time", boasted the BBC when it announced it, "before everyone was out walking for their mental health and wellbeing. We need a series like this now, more than ever."
And, God help us, it might just be right.
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