In Praise of Meditative TV

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.”

What Eno likes about 77 Million Paintings is that he has no idea what will appear on screen, nor what aesthetic effects will be produced. "That's pretty interesting. But what interests me more is the way people experience them. My shows are not narratives. Nothing much happens yet people come and stay for hours in a contemplative state. I thought, ... 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.