Netflix is Bringing A Really, Really, Chill New Feature Out

If you’ve ever wanted to see seven hours of unedited footage from a camera mounted to the front of a train—and who hasn’t?—your ship has come in. In August, Netflix began airing the Norwegian Broadcasting Company’s “Slow TV,” a genre which offers such viewing experiences as the four-hour National Knitting Evening, the six-hour National Firewood Night and the aforementioned Train Ride: Bergen to Oslo.

If you're wondering what goes on on these shows, the answer is: nothing. Nothing happens. 

It's not for everyone but we can see it going off for those who are feeling a little, well, stressed out. 

Thomas Hellum, who is employed by the Norwegian Broadcasting Company, NRK, is Slow TV’s producer and project manager. He told The Daily Beast that the show evolved from a brainstorming session with other station employees. The centennial of the Bergen Railway was fast approaching, and he and his team wanted to mark the occasion by filming the entire train journey from one coast of Norway to the other in its seven-hour entirety. To his surprise, NRK said yes.

“The idea was too wild to turn down,” he said.

Hellum thought that it might attract 1000 viewers. Instead, it attracted 450,000 viewers upon its debut, and went on to be seen by 1.2 million people!

He took this to mean people love this kind of stuff and wanted to create more programmes with similar themes: they’re long, they’re uninterrupted and they show a process in its entirety. All of the shows have met with similar success.

“More or less all of our slow projects have gained double or triple of the market share for the channel that night,” he said.

Hellum said that the next Slow TV project will follow a Laplander family as they guide thousands of reindeer through their migration from winter to summer pastures. This annual process takes five or six days, and Hellum has vowed to broadcast the whole thing. 

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