“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

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.

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 ... 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.

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 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

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

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.