The shorter, colder days are here (at least in Calgary where the Labour Day long weekend struggled to get to double digits), pumpkin spice everything is on the shelves, kids are back in school, and life is getting hectic.
After a summer of playing outside, chasing sunsets, and exploring the world, nesting is in order. You need to Netflix and chill.
And I don’t mean that in the way the kids’ say it, I mean it in the way grown-ups say it. When we chill, we chill out, we relax, we unwind, we stretch, we sigh.
So that will mean much bingeing of Narcos, The Get Down, Stranger Things, and all the other cool Netflix shows that everyone is talking about, but you haven’t seen yet.
Or .. you can just … chill.
To go along with all the awesome, biting, smart dramas and comedies lined up on your list, Netflix has released a series of shows called Slow TV. It’s a chance to purge your bingeing. There are no cliffhangers, no seminal moment that sucks you in to a longer story. Instead, slow tv celebrates the journey.
And I mean that literally. Netflix’s Slow TV features a program that is merely the view of a train traveling across Norway, from Bergen to Oslo. It’s a ride that takes more than 7 hours, all of it filmed from the front of the engine.
Parts of it are completely black (the camera rolls through the tunnels) with subtitles for when people cough. It’s terribly boring, entirely beautiful (the scenery of Norway is fantastic), and completely soothing as a moving piece of art in the background while you peck away on a keyboard or make dinner.
When the train ride was first broadcast on Norwegian public television, 20% of the country tuned in to catch a bit of the show.
Norway plays heavily in the Slow TV programming. You can watch Norwegians chop and tell stories about firewood, you can watch them knit for four hours, or you can see a segment of the ultimate Slow TV program: a 144 hour live broadcast from a boat.
In 2011, NRK, Norway’s national broadcaster, aired Minutt for Minutt, a 24/7 live broadcast of the Nordnorge cruise ship as it made an 1 100 mile journey along Norway’s coast. Millions of Norwegians watched the epic 6 day program and thousands more clamoured down to the coastlines to watch the ship go past.
Northern Passage is an hour long edit of that incredible exercise in Slow TV.
And there’s a lot more where that came from. According to Kottke, other popular Norwegian shows could be coming to the channel including 18 hours of salmon swimming upstream, 100 hours of Magnus Carlsen playing chess, and a 30-hour interview with a noted author.
So don’t worry about getting all caught up on the new big thing. The beauty of Netflix is that they’re always there waiting for you. Purge your bingeing and just … chill.
Disclosure: I’m a member of the Netflix Stream Team.