Mindless activities in front of screens are what I like to call “being dead while conscious.” These are the most readily available tools that allow us to leave ourselves, which can feel pretty good, or at the very least, pretty necessary. I am not against being dead while conscious. It’s hard to be a human living in a body. Sometimes it helps to be... 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 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.