“Emily in Paris” and the Rise of Ambient TV

TikTok’s For You tab serves an endless stream of short videos that algorithmically adapt to your interests, sorting the content most likely to engage you. Using it feels like having your mind read, because all you do is watch or skip, focus or ignore, a decision made too fast to be fully conscious. Individual videos or accounts matter less than cat... See more

Whereas the Internet once promised to provide on-demand access to limitless information and media to anyone willing to make use of a Google search, lately it has encouraged a more passive kind of engagement, a state of slack-jawed consumption only intensified by this past year’s quarantine ennui. 

There’s a danger that, through algorithmic digital platforms, we can stay ensconced in our soothing aesthetic bubbles.

He (Rem Koolhaas, 1995) added that the “pervasive lack of urgency and insistence acts like a potent drug,” inducing “a hallucination of the normal.” In other words, the hypnotic quality of ambient content creates a false sense that whatever it presents is a neutral condition, a common denominator, though it is decidedly not.

The ambience of ambient TV is often predicated on homogeneity; any diversity or discordance would disrupt the smooth, lulling surface.

Ambience offers the increasingly rare possibility of disengagement while still staring at a screen. Ambient television aims to erase thought entirely, smoothing any disruptive texture or dissonance.  It provides glossy, comforting oblivion, or, as Matisse once wrote, of his own paintings, “something like a good armchair.”

The advent of streaming, and cord-cutting, allowed viewers a more intentional relationship to TV, at least in theory. When Netflix and other platforms began dumping entire seasons of shows at once, binging became a byword for paying deep attention, as viewers gave themselves over to intricate drama or quirky comedy. But now we’re learning to stream... See more

Like earlier eras of TV, ambient television is less a creative innovation than a product of the technological and social forces of our time.

The earlier era of prestige TV was predicated on shows with meta-narratives to be puzzled out, and which merited deep analyses read the day after watching. Here, there is nothing to figure out; as prestige passes its peak, we’re moving into the ambient era, which succumbs to, rather than competes with, your phone.