In ‘vegetative state’
“Earth Moods” part of thriving comfort TV genre
TV series “Earth Moods” deemed as nonsuccess.
“Earth Moods,” which landed on Disney+ over the weekend, is a television show: five episodes, each 31 minutes long. So why does it look so much like a screensaver?
There are no voices in “Earth Moods” because there are no people. Just the abstract beauty of nature — the streaks and whorls of green water and red earth, as the screen drifts from dunes to reef to river delta. The soundtrack soughs and swells in step with the slowly moving cameras, occasionally giving way to the music of wind, water and birdsong.
Unlike a laptop or smarttv screensaver, “Earth Moods” takes some effort — you need to go to it. And you need to have paid for a Disney+ subscription. It
might not exist if it weren’t for the big tent of streaming video, but it’s still TV, even if it sits at the far edge, requiring participation but asking for only the tiniest bit of engagement. Gliding past creative, derivative and meditative, it arrives at vegetative — the couch potato’s final destination.
You could dismiss “Earth Moods” as an anomaly, an incidental bonus that Disney+ throws in for its more anxiety-ridden subscribers. It is that, but it’s also one of a relatively small collection of original series on the service.
It’s also not unique. It fits in the larger category of comfort TV, the genre that has thrived off the fallout from political despair and pandemic restrictions.
Today, comfort TV has taken on a new sophistication and substance. Shows like “Ted Lasso” on Apple TV+ and “Schitt’s Creek” (on multiple streamers) draw devoted audiences with a finely tooled sincerity that removes any potentially provocative or uncomfortable edge from their jokes.
Even more self-aware are the shows that play with the conventions of comfort TV while still embodying them. In HBO’S “Painting With John,” actor and artist John Lurie invites us into his home to watch him paint and listen to him opine. He’s the slacker nature host: Turning the camera on the horizon, he says: “There’s a sunset. You think of something poetic.”
Shows like these are at the high end of the comfort-tv spectrum, but “Earth Moods” has an increasing amount of company at the simpler end. Disney+ also offers “Zenimation,” a set of 10 shorts with titles like “Water” and “Flight” that edit together scenes from Disney’s animated movies so that we can “unplug, relax and enjoy.”
Slightly more demanding, but still aimed at alleviating stress, is the HBO Max series “A World of Calm,” based on a series of recordings for adults called “Sleep Stories.” Celebrity narrators present 22-minute episodes on standard subjects of nonfiction TV but they speak verrry slowly, in time with the progress of the images.
The category also includes instructional shows like Netflix’s “Headspace Guide to Meditation” and, coming April 28, the comically self-explanatory “Headspace Guide to Sleep.”
It’s the encapsulation of vegetative TV: television made to stop you from watching television.