In the streaming era, television has become increasingly split into categories that serve specific moods or contexts. Looking for a jolt of adrenaline? Try “Tehran,” a geopolitical spy thriller about the Iran-Israel conflict, from the head writer of “Fauda.” Want to be entertained yet slightly exasperated? Watch “Emily in Paris,” the endlessly riffable Netflix series about a young American who accidentally becomes an influencer in France. If you need to be cocooned in nostalgia—and slightly repulsed by adolescence—there’s the middle-school comedy “Pen15,” which is set in the early two-thousands. And, for anyone looking to escape the news cycle, there’s the burgeoning genre of apolitical, ahistorical comfort television, exemplified by “The Great British Baking Show” and “The Great Pottery Throw Down.”
A new show, HBO Max’s “A World of Calm,” takes this last category to an extreme. The show is an outgrowth of the meditation app Calm, which is trying to adapt its vast library of audio material for TV. The series débuted in October, and it doesn’t just service a viewer’s mood or desire; it seeks to induce a new state of mind—namely, a deep state of relaxation, or even a good, long nap. The first episode whisks us to the coral reefs of Indonesia’s Raja Ampat archipelago. Narrated by the actress Lucy Liu—whose voice, in this context, becomes so gentle and measured as to be unrecognizable—the episode zooms in, in ultra-high definition, on the details of the archipelago’s exotic, flourishing habitat. We aren’t meant to absorb the animals and vegetation with shock and delight, as with traditional nature documentaries. Instead, they’re presented as our harmonious proxies. The show’s climax, if there is one, involves a sea turtle visiting the archipelago, as it has done for “over one hundred million years . . . to rest and relax.” The turtle is shown settling onto the floor of the ocean, its own “underwater spa,” and waiting for fish to gently “polish his shell” by nibbling on it. Liu goes on to explain that nine minutes pass between each beat of the turtle’s heart—a description so evocative that I could imagine my own pulse slowing as I watched.
“A World of Calm” is Calm’s latest attempt to transform itself into a media empire. Launched in 2012 by a pair of entrepreneurss, the app serves the many, many people who are newly intrigued by the potential benefits of meditation and mindfulness. In its early days, the app’s small library of recordings—guided meditations that were designed to help users fall asleep, relieve anxiety, or focus at work—was mostly narrated by Tamara Levitt, a Canadian mindfulness instructor with an especially humane and lucid voice. By 2017, the company was reporting twenty-two million dollars in revenue, earned from the app’s subscription-based model and merchandise such as an aromatherapy spray; now it has raised more than a hundred million in venture capital and been valued at a billion dollars. At some point, flush with cash, the company began recruiting stars to do voice-overs and narrations.After a long hiatus from the app, I was shocked to open it and find a tabloid’s worth of celebrity names: I could choose a bedtime story read by Matthew McConaughey (one of the app’s more popular pieces), another recited by Harry Styles, or a multipart series from LeBron James about how his personal meditation journey has helped his success on the court. In addition to Liu, “A World of Calm” will feature narrations from stars with conveniently dulcet voices, among them Nicole Kidman, Mahershala Ali, Keanu Reeves, and Idris Elba. One episode even includes Oscar Isaac, who narrates a story about a noodle recipe passed down from generation to generation.
There is, of course, a deep contradiction running through phrases such as “star-studded meditation content” or “venture-funded meditation service.” Insofar as meditation is about solitude, peace, and the private tensions of an individual, it was never meant to be sold, let alone scaled. And there’s something especially perverse about how the world of corporate wellness has appropriated the practice; it’s turned mindfulness upside down, into a tool not just for self-discovery but for superhuman levels of productivity.
And yet, despite this broader, unsettling repackaging of meditation, “A World of Calm” demonstrates a great deal of restraint. There is absolutely nothing entertaining or titillating about it, by design. It will not make you better at your job, or less lonely, or more inclined to support LeBron James. The show has hints of A.S.M.R., the vast genre of Internet content designed to provoke a soothing sensation of “brain tingling.” (A closeup shot of coral reefs, in which tiny bubbles pop off the reef’s structure and into the open water, does, in fact, give one a pleasant buzz in the head.) “Calm” shares some DNA with canonical nature documentaries—“Planet Earth” or its Netflix spinoff, “Our Planet”—mostly in its astonishing cinematography, and in the way it moves from the small and the particular to the panoramic. But those documentaries delight in narrative tension, in underscoring the drama and grandeur of the wild. Violent death and extinction are a constant presence, as is environmental decay, which such series have begun to invoke with increasing urgency. “A World of Calm” skips over those sorts of menaces altogether. They are, after all, the kinds of things one loses sleep over.
