What To Watch This Week: The Spell Of "Slow TV"

This week, viewers will sink into their couches and watch hours of firewood crackling and knitting needles weaving through yarn. No, this isn’t the Rio Olympics; these are the subjects of Norwegian television sensation Slow TV, now available on Netflix. Pop culture expert Bob Thompson talked to Boston Public Radio on Monday about why this unlikely show beat out the Games as this week's best show.

Even though NBC Universal has promised 6,755 hours of multimedia Olympics coverage, a modest Opening Ceremony signaled that TV watchers may want to switch gears. Slow TV, from Norway’s public broadcasting company NRK, has been spellbinding Norwegians for years with endless hours of seemingly banal events, from a train ride to knitting. Luckily for the show’s legions of followers, seven episodes are now available for streaming on Netflix. The scenes don’t guarantee a dramatic crescendo, but they deliver a rare kind of gratification that’s anything but instant.

“If you watch carefully, things develop. There is a narrative. A marshmallow will come into this flame with someone roasting it. Wood will be added to it. It’s not just a perpetual loop,” Thompson said of the “National Firewood Night” episode. “In 2009, when Norway introduced that 7.5 hour train trip, 45% of the entire population of Norway watched at least part of it.” Slow TV's hours of footage manage to capture the attention, wonder, and imagination of TV-watchers who might otherwise juggle three screens at once.

While Thompson endorsed Slow TV as an Olympics alternative, he advised viewers to steer clear of Bachelor in Paradise. “This has become an extraordinary franchise for ABC, but Bachelor in Paradise this season, this is where a bunch of the losers from previous seasons get together in what’s kind of a hedonistic, semi-pornographic sort of thing. Bachelor in Paradise makes the Bachelor look like Masterpiece Theater,” he said. “How could it be real when you’re having all these intimate sorts of conversations and there’s three lighting guys and four camera people?”

Bob Thompson is the founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture and a Trustee Professor of Television and Popular Culture at Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. To hear the full interview, click on the audio link above.