Slow TV is Coming to America

Posted on March 23, 2015

Norway is reportedly obsessed with the new Slow TV trend. What is slow TV? It's programming that is like a documentary that unfolds in real time and takes hours to watch. There are no arguments, no car chases and no murders. It's unlikely any cops or detectives will show up. Now the U.S. will get its first taste of Slow TV on Black Friday, 2015.

Deadline reports that the Travel Channel has acquired the format and will debut its first Slow Road Live event on Black Friday: November 27, 2015. The show begins at 9:00 a.m. Eastern time and will run for 12 hours. The show follows a road trip set in a to be named location. No doubt it will be quite scenic.

The Travel Channel is airing the show as counter programming for Black Friday, traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year. Black Friday has been creeping earlier for years -- now stores open on Thanksgiving Day, interrupting family meal times and leading to some worker strikes.

Ross Babbit, Travel Channel SVP of programming and development, had this to say about the event: "While everyone else is out hustling and bustling to get the latest deals on Black Friday, we're giving our viewers a chance to unwind with 12 hours of reality in real time." Babbit says that the idea is to get everyone together to watch the beautiful scenery and enjoy nature. The show will offer viewers the chance to interact with the program via social media and a second screen. We hope they have plenty of moderators on hand to screen out all the inappropriate comments that are sure to appear.

So who is responsible for this trend? Deadline says it all began with Norway's public broadcast station NRK2. In 2009 it trained fixed cameras on a train journey from Bergen to Oslo on a Friday. Five million people were watching TV and 1.2 million watched the train journey. The next episode featured a coastal cruise ship journey. 70% of the population tuned in for that one. But it got more exciting. The channel shows hours of knitting and spinning -- in absolute silence.

Will Americans tune in for hours to watch someone knit or drive through the countryside? Stranger things have happened.