Jesus Christ, you weren't kidding.

deleted by creator

the obvious evolution of this is being able to vr browse chapo.chat, read theory, watch harry potter, while being anally fisted and getting blown by an android who looks like bernie sanders

By the end of its second episode, I knew that Netflix’s new series “Emily in Paris” was not a lighthearted romantic travelogue but an artifact of contemporary dystopia. At that point, Emily had already gone jogging, and the multicolored wheels of her Apple-esque step-counter appeared on my television screen. The circles filled; Emily had pleased the robots monitoring her health. During her next run, a small square popped up: a visualization of Emily’s Instagram account, to which she posted a photo of Paris, accruing onscreen likes. Later, Emily talked, via video call, with her old marketing-agency boss back in Chicago, whom she had replaced on the Paris sojourn when the boss found herself pregnant. My television displayed a closeup of Emily’s phone showing the boss’s face, inset with an image of Emily’s face—three layers of screens at once.

Emily is a millennial naïf, played by Lily Collins, who is meant to bring American-capitalist wisdom to a French agency that caters to luxury brands. The showrunner is Darren Star, the creator of “Sex and the City,” but if Carrie’s column lent that show a narrative structure and momentum—everything is copy—“Emily in Paris” begins and ends in an avalanche of desiccated digital-marketing language that seems to have subsumed Emily’s soul. She cares about nothing more than “social,” impressions, R.O.I. Many episodes climax in the successful taking of a photo for Instagram. In the course of the season, fulfilling a prophecy cast by Collins’s dramatic eyebrows and wide eyes, our heroine becomes an Instagram influencer in her own right, those onscreen follower numbers jumping to ten, twenty thousand (not nearly enough to make her the kind of celebrity the show portrays, as viewers pointed out). Emily’s job is to get more likes for brands; her life is to get more likes for herself. Everything is content.

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.

In the two-thousand-tens, there was a brief vogue for “slow TV,” reality television of unedited reality, such as a more than seven-hour real-time video of a train ride from Bergen to Oslo, shot in 2009, and a Norwegian production, in 2016, showing twelve hours of the extreme tidal current in the strait of Saltstraumen. The durational videos inspire introversion and reflection, like meditation: “Slow TV is high-definition in its visual information, yet it gets its meaning from viewers’ imaginative consciousness,” Nathan Heller wrote, in The New Yorker. I recall the videos chiefly from parties at my artist friends’ house, where everyone would inevitably end up stoned on the couch, gasping as the train entered a tunnel and the screen blacked out. Slow TV inspires a kind of awe at realness, the texture of experience itself; it’s a phenomenological exercise that heightens our perception. Ambient television, in contrast, aims to erase thought entirely, smoothing any disruptive texture or dissonance. Its high-resolution shots are chopped and composed into lulling montages—slow motion, fast motion, drone footage—that numb the senses with color and movement. It provides glossy, comforting oblivion, or, as Matisse once wrote, of his own paintings, “something like a good armchair.”