But all of that barely matters. The purpose of “Emily in Paris” is to provide sympathetic background for staring at your phone, refreshing your own feeds—on which you’ll find “Emily in Paris” memes, including a whole genre of TikTok remakes. It’s O.K. to look at your phone all the time, the show seems to say, because Emily does it, too. The episodic plots are too thin to ever be confusing; when you glance back up at the television, chances are that you’ll find tracking shots of the Seine or cobblestoned alleyways, lovely but meaningless. If you want more drama, you can open Twitter, to augment the experience. Or just leave the show on while cleaning the inevitable domestic messes of quarantine. Eventually, sensing that you’ve played two episodes straight without pausing or skipping, Netflix will ask if you’re still really watching. Shamed, I clicked the Yes button, and Emily continued being in Paris.
In this and other recent programming, Netflix is pioneering a genre that I’ve come to think of as ambient television. It’s “as ignorable as it is interesting,” as the musician Brian Eno wrote, when he coined the term “ambient music” in the liner notes to his 1978 album “Ambient 1: Music for Airports,” a wash of slow melodic synth compositions. Ambient denotes something that you don’t have to pay attention to in order to enjoy but which is still seductive enough to be compelling if you choose to do so momentarily. Like gentle New Age soundscapes, “Emily in Paris” is soothing, slow, and relatively monotonous, the dramatic moments too predetermined to really be dramatic. Nothing bad ever happens to our heroine for long. 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.
“Emily in Paris” was just renewed for a second season; its formula of thin fictional storytelling wrapped in exotic backdrops was an instant success that seems destined to be reiterated many times over, in other locales, with other Emilies. But Netflix’s back catalogue of ambient options is made up of reality shows: “Dream Home Makeover” is ambient interior decorating; “Taco Chronicles,” ambient foodie travel; “Get Organized with the Home Edit,” ambient cleaning; “Street Food,” ambient cooking; “MeatEater,” ambient outdoorsmanship. What these shows all have in common is their placidity—there’s little in the way of conflict or tension—and their reliance on B-roll, the footage that filmmakers intersperse with their main shots to smooth transitions between cuts. There often seems to be more B-roll than A, however. Viewers can select from footage of beef getting sliced, shelves being filled, or walks through foreign cities.
Like earlier eras of TV, ambient television is less a creative innovation than a product of the technological and social forces of our time. Beginning in the nineteen-thirties, soap operas, first on the radio and then on television, broadcast long-running daytime dramas in which the logic of subplots didn’t matter as much as consistency—the fact that they were produced quickly and cheaply and broadcast at the same time every day. The name came from the soap brands that bought ads on the shows, to reach the audience of women at home, but it also evoked the banality of domestic labor that the programs distracted from, providing welcome background noise.
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 as if we never abandoned cable in the first place, especially during quarantine, when nothing’s stopping you from leaving the TV on all day long. As with soaps and chores, the current flow of ambient television provides a numbing backdrop to the rest of our digital consumption: feeds of fragmented text, imagery, and video algorithmically sorted to be as provocative as possible. Ambience offers the increasingly rare possibility of disengagement while still staring at a screen.
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 as if we never abandoned cable in the first place, especially during quarantine, when nothing’s stopping you from leaving the TV on all day long. As with soaps and chores, the current flow of ambient television provides a numbing backdrop to the rest of our digital consumption: feeds of fragmented text, imagery, and video algorithmically sorted to be as provocative as possible. Ambience offers the increasingly rare possibility of disengagement while still staring at a screen.
