Slow TV: Part 1, by David Conover

OK, finally time to share a few thoughts on that bastion of speed, the monitor. No, I’m not referring to the heart monitor… ba-beep…. ba-beep… ba-beep. The lines of that pulse hold us steady. I mean the television and the computer and all the other media monitors populating and accelerating our lives, whether we like it or not. And that last phrase –“like it or not”- pretty much sums up my own feelings about those monitors. One moment, I like ‘em; the next, I do not. Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em.

Thankfully, we can make choices. In the early eighties, my wife and I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts and decided to sign up for a three-month cable TV subscription package. Since starting college, neither of us had been in one place for long enough to really watch much television. Now, in graduate school, it was time to grow up and settle down. Well, we settled down each night at 7pm for a gripping one-hour experience of Star Trek, the Next Generation. These characters raced about the universe and ruled our lives thereafter, night after night, week after week. Star Trek wasn’t all we did, of course. One night, we had tickets to listen to Gorbachev speak. He was on his first trip to the United States, and he was speaking in person just a couple of blocks away. After dinner, we started walking to the event. Halfway there, we realized that the time was nearly 7pm. Oops, the universe is calling. We heeded the call. Back to the apartment monitor we went. In that moment, we realized that YES, television was actually all too much all we did. Three months passed. The cable TV subscription needed renewal. With each other’s help, my wife and I took the bold move and chose to NOT renew. Not because we didn’t like TV, but because we liked it too much. Two children came along. We moved to the coast of Maine. Twenty-five years later, still no television in our house.

This is not actually a huge accomplishment, since I’m a producer of television and have mini-production studio in my barn right next door. Every day, I open that door and am surrounded by monitors, each able to mystify and fascinate with their blinking light shows. I love those moving shadows on the cave wall, beaming in from far away, seemingly breaking the laws of physics. And we are starting to lose the battle with monitors in the house, as video successfully grabs the Net and the social lives of young teen-agers. Such are the choices to be made.

In that barn space, I do believe that Slow TV is possible, though oxymoronic. Our team proved this with the television series Sunrise Earth, which we created for Discovery HD Theater and has been running in 15 countries world-wide every morning for five years. We’re doing it with the BlueMarvel programs we’re creating now. We can choose to slow down the light show on our monitors. And you can always decide to just wake up early, go outside, and watch what happens in the real sunrise. This is not too distant a land. More on how we make Slow TV in my next blog, which is Slow TV: Part 2. I’ll share what’s been learned and a few comments from viewers, too.