On Thursday, unheralded and largely unnoticed, Netflix quietly released what may well go down as its most revolutionary piece of programming yet. Using the same groundbreaking live technology that Chris Rock trialled when he dropped his Will Smith-baiting standup special Selective Outrage last spring, the streaming giant launched a show that might not just be the future of reality TV, but may also hint at the direction television as a whole will take in the aftermath of the SAG and WGA strikes.
The show? Baby Animal Cam.
What is Baby Animal Cam? What if I told you that it is livestreamed footage from Cleveland Metroparks Zoo? What if I told you that there are no presenters or dialogue? What if I told you that literally nothing happens in it whatsoever, and that it’s on for two hours then pretty much ends without warning, and it’s on again on Thursday evening? You’re in, right?
I’m really not exaggerating here. That’s all there is to Baby Animal Cam. The show starts, you watch a bunch of monkeys flop about for a few minutes, and then another bunch of animals appear on screen, and then another bunch, and this goes on for two hours. Some jaunty library music plays in the background. Occasionally a little pop-up graphic will appear, never saying anything more specific than “Sometimes otters run around”. That’s all that happens. For two hours.
The sheer existence of Baby Animal Cam raises so many questions. Like, why is it live? These are animals in a zoo. There’s not much in the way of jeopardy. The otters aren’t going to be attacked by eagles. None of them are going to win the Super Bowl or be involved in a major international news story. The most exciting thing that happened on Thursday’s episode was that an orangutan took slightly longer than you would expect to eat a leaf. Unless they are pathologically obsessed with knowing that an orangutan is chewing on a leaf right now, the audience has nothing to gain from the liveness of it.
Also, who decided that this was going to be the future of television? Because this isn’t a new idea. It’s the streaming equivalent of pre-broadband internet, when you’d get a momentary jolt of novelty excitement from dialling into a static webcam of a waterfall, or the Eiffel Tower, or a coffee pot.
The more cynical among you might smell a rat here. They might try to label Baby Animal Cam as the sort of cheap, unauthored television that streamers can use to prove that they don’t need the services of those pesky creators with their annoying requests for meaningful compensation. Or they might tumble even further down the rabbit hole – as I confess that I briefly did – and assume that this was some slow-burn Adult Swim-style Halloween prank that would, over the weeks, mutate into something more sinister.
But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Baby Animal Cam really is just a live stream of some baby animals. And I love it.
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I’ve always been a fan of Slow TV, the Nordic micro-genre responsible for hits like the unedited seven-hour train journey Bergensbanen: Minutt for Minutt and the unedited 134-hour cargo voyage Hurtigruten: Minutt for Minutt. They’re long and contemplative, deliberately breaking every rule of television, and the lack of action is the whole point. In this regard, Baby Animal Cam seems like Slow TV’s natural successor.
Or at least it would most of the time. By a quirk of timing, however, the first episode felt like something more than that. The world is currently going through a moment of unimaginable horror, ugly and complicated and violent, and worse is to come. By last Thursday, a great deal of us already felt ground down and hollowed out, unable to process the deluge of nightmarish imagery.
It cannot possibly have been deliberate, but for Netflix to choose this precise moment to crack open a side door and whisper, “Anyone want two hours of baby otters?” felt like a kindness. Hopefully Baby Animal Cam isn’t the future of television, because even the biggest Slow TV aficionados will quickly hit their limit of animals doing literally nothing at all in Cleveland. But as a one-off, right now, watching it feels like having a brain massage. We might deserve more than Baby Animal Cam, but for now it’s the duvet fort we all need.