With tension from all sides, Hollywood considers ways to calm your nerves

As a fraught election season reaches its crescendo amid a devastating pandemic, stressing out everyone from ordinary citizens to government officials, these personalities believe soothing shows can be both smart business and a cultural necessity. Call it the calm collective: a group of executives and producers offering an antidote to much of what Americans consume on entertainment platforms (and cable-news networks) these days.

From a channel with the late “The Joy of Painting” star Bob Ross to a new “Barney” movie, from shows about floral arrangements to a series based on the popular Calm app, their shared goal is simple: to make content move a little more slowly and help people breathe a little more easily.

“I think folks are looking for a way to escape not only the stress of normal lives and news but also really intense entertainment,” said Jennifer O’Connell, vice president of nonfiction series at HBO Max and one of the drivers of Hollywood’s calm movement. “They’re looking for types of shows that help you escape by washing over you. Not all engagement has to be stressful engagement.”

O’Connell’s HBO Max debuted a show based on the Calm app — “A World of Calm,” a 10-episode array of beautiful images, soothing celebrity voice-overs (think Keanu Reeves and Kate Winslet), soaring music and very loose narratives set everywhere from a cocoa-producing Central American rainforest to a glass-blowing studio in Holland. Producers knew they were doing something right several months ago when they walked into an editing suite and saw that a colleague watching footage had fallen asleep.

But if much of this material is the opposite of polling numbers and positivity rates, it remains uncertain if Hollywood producers — or the audience — can actually slow down enough to make it work.

Yes, they see the irony.

For much of this century, Hollywood has had a clear objective: work viewers into as much of a lather as possible. The highest-grossing movies of all time are “Avengers: Endgame” and “Avatar,” while the most-watched pay-cable show of this era is “Game of Thrones.” All three offer tense standoffs, climactic battle scenes and high-burn elements. They try to make us sweat.

Such content, researchers have found, can leave a deep physical and physiological mark. A study from Linder College in Oregon revealed that clips from “aggressive” movies activate mental aggression, while research conducted by University College London indicated that action movies can even take a toll on the cardiac muscle.

So modern entertainment leaders have begun seeing another way and taken steps to experiment with it. They’re taking cues from the “slow television movement,” an unusual phenomenon originating in Norway a decade ago before spreading across Europe and to the United States in which people would gather to watch trains roll through the countryside and ships cruise on the open seas for hours on end. (America had its own precursor with the Christmas “yule log,” in which, well, a fire burns a log for many hours.)

Continuing this spirit, executives at ViacomCBS’s streaming service Pluto TV licensed a well of content from Ross, the ultimate soothe-meister, and created a channel devoted to him. If you want to see happy little trees spring up everywhere — all 380 episodes of them — they are now available on the platform.

A boomlet of British competition shows about baking, pottery and sewing, meanwhile, have all gained popularity in the United States, thanks in part to Netflix several years ago acquiring “The Great British Baking Show” after its earlier run on PBS.

Younger programming has also taken center stage: Mattel has put a new live-action “Barney” movie into development. While some parents may find the playful purple dinosaur necessitates its own trip to the Calm app, principals are emphasizing its soothing effects. Star-producer Daniel Kaluuya told Entertainment Weekly this month that the property’s cheerful placidity was “really, really needed” now.

Relatedly, interest in “Cocomelon,” in which animated characters tell stories and sing lullabies, has surged. Derived from a popular YouTube channel, the series has become a 2020 phenomenon since debuting on Netflix this summer — the tenth-most watched show across any streaming platform the last week of August, according to Nielsen.

No content, however, epitomizes the relaxation trend like a “A World of Calm.”

Originating in 2012 as a meditation website for stressed-out Silicon Valley coders, the Calm website and later app aims to bring mindfulness and meditation to consumers via phone, with both paid and free versions. It had been moseying along, gathering just $37 million by the fifth year of its existence.

“For a long time, it was an uphill battle; people didn’t take us seriously,” co-founder Michael Acton Smith said. “They didn’t think mindfulness and meditation could come via your phone, or be a business.”

But the service quintupled its revenue between 2017 and 2019, and app installations climbed into the tens of millions. Users were drawn to functions like “Sleep Stories,” read-aloud tales designed to lull noisy and news-distracted minds to slumber. Soon celebrities started noticing. Moby created music for the platform, Matthew McConaughey gave the paid app to the kids in his Just Keep Livin’ Foundation charity, fan LeBron James signed on as a pitchman. Creative Artists Agency came on to represent the company.

By late 2019, the group had attracted Nutopia, the production company run by Jane Root, the D.C.-based producer and former president of Discovery Networks, for a new show. They developed “A World of Calm” based on “Sleep Stories,” and sold it to HBO Max.

“Friends would laugh at us — a show that makes people fall asleep,” Root said. “But the people that got it really got it. This is what we need right now.”

She said unlike slow TV, though, these shows must contain plot momentum; there is a subtle art, she said, of luring consumers in so they can tune out. “We had to work very hard to resist everybody’s normal instinct to keep things moving with energy and speed; it’s anti-narrative,” she said. “But an episode has to go somewhere. You have to discover something you didn’t know before. It has to be calming, but interesting.”

Calm programming also doesn’t have to be all sepia colors and dulcet tones. Vintage television can achieve the same soothing effect, which is one reason Peacock is debuting a revival of “Saved by the Bell” this month to go along with 20th century balms “The Johnny Carson Show,” “Punky Brewster” and “Leave it to Beaver.”

Television experts say it’s no accident executives are looking back to 20th-century programming — many of those shows were themselves diversionary.

“The ’60s were a time of great social unrest and division. And on television, it was a time of flying nuns, talking horses, suburban witches and a mother that’s a car,” said Robert Thompson a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University, alluding to TV hits. “Television has a history of shows that stand in stark contrast to what’s going on in the world.”

But he cautions against believing it will all prove popular. “It doesn’t surprise me that producers and executives want to try things like this. But I think it can be an oversimplification to say we want calming or comforting programming now. History tells us in dark times we also want to watch a lot of stuff that reminds us of what we’re living through.”

It’s also not clear calm programming is the best path to relaxation. A study published in September by NIH’s National Center for Biotechnology Information actually found that horror movie fans were feeling less distress during the pandemic than non-horror fans.

“It seems counterintuitive, but scary movies demand your attention a lot; they take anything you’re ruminating about and transfer it to the screen, and then when the movies ends your worry ends,” said the University of Chicago’s Coltan Scrivner, one of the study’s authors. “With a nature documentary, your mind has nowhere to go but back to the worries.”

Acton Smith said he and colleagues have reasons to believe their approach is working. Unlike streaming services, which measure engagement — whether viewers furiously click on the next show — calm content comes with a different bar for success. “The best feedback we can get,” he said, “is when someone says, ‘I’ve never seen one of your shows all the way to the end.’”

HBO Max does not reveal viewership numbers. But O’Connell says “World of Calm” has proved so popular since its debut that the service is now considering more episodes. In a similar vein, this month (right after the election) it will premiere “Full Bloom,” a floral-arrangement competition show that “will allow audiences to escape into a surreal world as contestants design and execute some of the most wondrous, Wonka-esque floral creations ever seen.”

The Calm app, meanwhile, is now reaching 100 million installations, Acton Smith said, as the pandemic and election tumult have driven people to seek respite.

But those behind the programming also say it may be just more than just the current anti-Zen conditions at play. They see something else in the trend: an alternative to streaming’s deep-dive, commitment-heavy binge culture.

“When you’re watching these [calm] shows you don’t need to know who the characters are from year one, season one or have a multiyear viewing experience,” said Jeff Shultz, chief business officer of Pluto, noting the recent popularity of “Antiques Roadshow” in addition to the Bob Ross deal. “If one end of the spectrum is an investment and daunting decision, the other end is something that’s just an experience. You don’t need to know anything.”

Shultz did not say whether anyone had completed the 380-episode Ross cycle or whether doing so might bring on its own kind of restless agitation.