The 2015 début of Netflix’s “Chef’s Table,” in retrospect, may have paved the way for ambient streaming content. It mingled documentary-style interviews of and about chefs, whom it upheld as visionary artists, with salivating closeups of their dishes, on the model of “Jiro Dreams of Sushi.” (The show and the film were both created by David Gelb.) After six seasons of “Chef’s Table,” Netflix has spun the show off into multiple, increasingly literal series that exemplify the tendencies of ambient TV. “Street Food” focusses on the casual cuisine of different regions, a mood board of inebriated snacking. “Taco Chronicles” eliminates the need for a human subject altogether, by offering narrations from the personified voice of the food itself: “Soy el taco de carnitas.” Chef biography or historical education come second to the hindbrain visual pleasure of meat bouncing on a grill. The shows are functionally screen savers, never demanding your attention; they do draw it, but only as much as a tabletop bouquet of flowers. (Still, owing to such blatant subliminal messaging, I finished watching “Taco Chronicles” absolutely desperate for tacos.)
The passive engagement of ambient television is a boon for streaming services, which just want you to keep binging so that you feel your subscription is justified. I noticed the show “Dream Home Makeover” immediately when it débuted, on October 16th, because Netflix’s recommendation algorithm put it at the top of my account’s home page. In February of this year, the streaming service launched a “Top 10” feature, which displays the ten most popular shows of the day in your country and tags the shows’ thumbnails with their rank—an effort to ameliorate the uncanny feeling, often inspired by algorithmic feeds, that no one else is seeing quite the same thing that you are. The feature also makes surfing Netflix an even more passive experience: whatever other people are watching is probably good, or at least you’ll be able to discuss it with a friend later. (“Emily in Paris” made the top spot.) “Dream Home Makeover” immediately hit the charts; I clicked on it because it was there.
What followed was a plush haze of beige fabric, built-in open shelving, and brass fixtures, as Shea and Syd McGee, the co-founders of the Utah design firm Studio McGee, decorated vast minimalist mansions around their home base of Salt Lake City. Client projects are interspersed with vignettes of the McGees’s own under-construction home, which looks like a cavernous ski lodge crossed with a denuded Dutch church after the sixteenth-century Protestant Beeldenstorm. Another couple the McGees work for, wealthy developers of tract housing, boast on camera that their new house is seventy-nine hundred square feet. Never has a television show featured so much blank, empty space—a mirror to the state of my mind as I watched it.
Shea, the principal designer, overlays each new room with the same palette of custom molding, faux mid-century furniture, gleaming countertops, and pendant lamps. Knowing exactly what to expect each time doesn’t dull the pleasure of the unveiling; the change is still more satisfyingly dramatic than the superficial closet rearrangements of “The Home Edit.” Yet even an authentic mid-century-modern house in Los Angeles gets the white-wall, beige-couch, marble-backsplash treatment in Episode 4, its history flattened into easy Instagram friendliness.
“Dream Home Makeover” is Netflix’s attempt to replicate the successful format of “Fixer Upper,” HGTV’s redecorating behemoth, which stars another husband-and-wife team with a signature style commodified by books and product lines. What distinguishes Netflix’s version is the sheer visual vacuum. Everything is white, including nearly all of the people. Shea graduated from Brigham Young University, and she and Syd moved from California to Salt Lake City to establish their company and raise their two daughters. The first few episodes focus on other Utah couples who want the replica-McGee style. Many of them dress the same and have the same haircuts: military-short for the men, blond fusilli curls for the women. The clients often have a plenitude of bedrooms or bunks and boast of their large families. Mormonism is all but explicit, and yet the show, coasting along on its identikit makeovers, never acknowledges it.
The ambience of ambient TV is often predicated on homogeneity; any diversity or discordance would disrupt the smooth, lulling surface. (“Emily in Paris” almost entirely stars white actors, too.) The lurking subtext of “Dream Home Makeover,” a kind of soft-white capitalist nationalism cloaked in throw pillows, brought to mind for me the architect Rem Koolhaas’s essay “The Generic City,” from 1995. In it, Koolhaas argues that globalization has caused a mass homogenization that leaves modern cities feeling like an airport, “a trance of almost unnoticeable aesthetic experiences.” He 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.
There are other styles of décor in the world, even if “Dream Home Makeover” doesn’t depict them. For viewers of color, the show’s presumed neutrality was immediately discordant, as Twitter reactions demonstrated. What qualifies as soothingly ambient differs depending on the audience, and Netflix, with its onslaught of shows of a strange, unstated specificity, is trying to serve multiple varieties. Another Netflix design production, “Styling Hollywood,” which débuted in August, 2019, stars the Black gay couple Jason Bolden and Adair Curtis, yet it hasn’t returned for a second season, and certainly didn’t gain the exposure—or perhaps the home-page recommendation support—that propelled “Dream Home Makeover” to meme status.
There’s a danger that, through algorithmic digital platforms, we can stay ensconced in our soothing aesthetic bubbles. When the season of “Dream Home Makeover” finishes on Netflix, it continues on Studio McGee’s Instagram account, where they’ve been posting clips that might as well be television outtakes, though they’re self-produced: more soft sofas, light fabrics, and blond children. TV is social media and social media is TV—an ouroboros. The McGee ambient universe sprawls across platforms, perpetuating the hallucination of the normal. You never need to leave it, especially if your home is already designed to look like theirs.
Whereas the Internet once promised to provide on-demand access to limitless information and media to anyone willing to make use of a Google search, lately it has encouraged a more passive kind of engagement, a state of slack-jawed consumption only intensified by this past year’s quarantine ennui. Streaming companies once pitched themselves as innovators for offering the possibility to watch anything at any time, but do we really want to choose? The prevalence of ambient media suggests that we don’t. Netflix even recently announced that it is experimenting with its own version of a preprogrammed TV channel, called Direct.
Serving ambient experience is now a competition for digital platforms, as they attempt to further infiltrate our lives. During the past four years, TikTok has become the fastest-growing social-media platform ever, with an estimated eight hundred million users in 2020. What distinguishes TikTok is not its content nor its format of minute-long clips—it’s usually some variation of “America’s Funniest Home Videos”—but the nature of its feed. 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 categories or memes; at the moment, my feed is mostly clips of skateboarding, cooking, and carpentry, not unlike the mundanity of the Netflix shows but also accelerated into media gavage. TikTok is an app for ambience.
More universal right now than “Emily in Paris,” or any streaming show, is a single TikTok user, 420doggface208, also known as Nathan Apodaca, a thirty-seven-year-old Idahoan of Native American and Mexican descent. Apodaca posted a selfie video taken while skateboarding down a highway, under a blue sky settling into sunset. He lip-synchs to Fleetwood Mac’s hit “Dreams,” from 1977, and swigs from a large plastic container of Ocean Spray cran-raspberry juice. The video’s elements don’t logically cohere or relate; they just collide, like random S.E.O. terms. Yet Apodaca’s clip has more than seventy million views, and drove “Dreams” onto the Billboard streaming Top Ten. It’s more atmosphere than content, the motion, the music, and the backdrop coalescing into a single moment of bittersweet freedom that loops over and over again.
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I read the first part, nodded, then scrolled on. Symptomatic?