To mark the centenary of the railway line linking Oslo to Bergen, Norway, in 2009 public television NRK broadcast the entirety of this magnificent train journey lasting more than seven hours, only from the driver’s point of view. The public, surprisingly, was there. This is considered to be how Scandinavian “Slow TV” was born, 15 years ago.
On the same channel, two years later, we broadcast continuously for five days the journey of a liner which skirted the majestic fjords of western Norway. Some 3.2 million viewers took a look, that’s a third of the Norwegian population…
Other “slow television” programs have since become all the rage on the NRK airwaves thanks to images of bucolic landscapes, but also to an ordinary fireplace or to all the stages of knitting, from shearing the sheep to to the last stitch of the cardigan.
For six years, Swedish public television has broadcast for two weeks, without interruption, The great crossing of the elk which, as its name suggests, features moose migrating to new pastures. One in ten Swedes tune in, both on traditional television and on various digital platforms. In addition to these 20 million views, there are audiences from other European countries.
“Slow TV” has health benefits, experts say, giving viewers an opportunity to relax and meditate. So why do I so often hear people grumbling about a TV show they think is too slow?
I am not talking, in this case, about programs dealing with the transhumance of deer or rail transport, but rather about conventional fiction television series, which take advantage of the long format given to them to take the time – as Léandre sings – to portray their characters and their plots well.
The main interest of the television series, when compared to cinema, is precisely this luxury of time, which allows us to deepen the psychology of the characters, to evoke a troubled past, overcoming trials, vanished happiness or simply to reveal drop by drop of clues of what awaits the viewer in the next episodes.
The series is not constrained to concision, condensation or ellipses as the feature film can be. At the top of her art, she offers an appreciation of the complexities of the human experience, at its most beautiful and ugliest, its simplest and its most difficult, its most joyful and its most tortured.
Take for example Ripley, a splendid series by Steven Zaillian broadcast on Netflix, based on the work of Patricia Highsmith. Throughout the first episode, we discover Tom Ripley (Andrew Scott), his forgery schemes, his life of lies and misery in a dingy room in New York. He leaves his daily life without opportunities for the adventure of a hunt on the Amalfi coast, thanks to a meeting with a rich businessman who wants to find his son. But only towards the end of the episode.
Many have found that Ripley, a monochrome TV series inspired by film noir, took a while to “take off”. Why should a series take off? Why couldn’t we savor, in this restraint, in this languor, in this imposed indolent rhythm, the richness of a story which fits in the form of a series, even more than the films which were made from it (The Talented Mr Ripley by Anthony Minghella, Full Sun by René Clément), the essence of Patricia Highsmith’s novel?
Ripley is of course not “Slow TV” in the sense that the Scandinavians understand it. It’s perhaps not “telescargot” either, as the French would say. It’s American-style “Slow TV”, just like the series The Wire, Six Feet Under Or Succession.
Sometimes contemplative television, which focuses more on the characters, their torments, their gray areas or their ambitions, than on constant dramatic twists and turns of the situation.
The Americans, precisely, would say that these series are “ character driven » (character-centered), as opposed to “ plot driven » (plot-focused). Ripley belongs to both categories, even if its first two episodes – 50 minutes each – mainly serve to make us understand who the mysterious character at the heart of the intrigue is.
Obviously a series of eight episodes of around an hour telling more or less the same story has a slower pace than a 2h20 film. The last episode of Ripley alone lasts 76 minutes. On the other hand, it is not because a series “takes its time” that it is boring. It’s not because she stretches the pleasure that she stretches the sauce.
A series, in any case, does not have the luxury of boring. Especially not with such an impatient audience. Patience is a great and rare virtue, wrote André Gide. It allows you to appreciate a work at its true value. Whether it be Ripley… or a fireplace on TV.