Martijn Doolaard Builds Something Great
I’ve fallen in love with a television show so obstinately antithetical to classic narrative structure that it may as well be a different species of entertainment altogether. Perhaps it is. It certainly does not exist on a traditional network, and never could. The show has almost no dialogue. Its story proceeds at a glacial pace. Each Sunday, a new languid episode arrives, and at the end of 40-50 minutes, very little has happened. The show doesn’t even have a name. It’s wonderful.
The show is the creation of a 39-year-old Dutch “photographer, film maker, and travel writer” named Martijn Doolaard. His eponymous YouTube channel has over half a million subscribers, all of us tuning in each week to watch him work on the tiny and decrepit stone cabins he bought about a year and a half ago high in the Italian Alps.
Doolaard dresses like a nineteenth century peasant and looks as if he stepped out of a Van Gogh painting. He drives a beat-up Suzuki four-wheeler that always seems in danger of stalling. The “cabins” were built in 1903 and were used as animal shelters until now. After over a year of renovations, they are still unlivable.
Each episode consists of Martijn making marginal progress on his work, usually alone, sometimes with help from locals, friends, or family. This week’s show consisted of Martijn and four guys digging a French drain. Nobody says much. Sometimes they eat lunch.
Now that we writers are on strike, maybe it’s a good time to think about story. Traditionally, basic story structure consists of a beginning, middle, and end. The story should have escalating low points and high points building to a climax, which resolves all the narrative threads (in the case of a film) or that episode’s major narrative questions (in the case of a television show). In the era of streaming television, a good episode will also open a new narrative question, which will be addressed in the next episode.
Martijn Doolaard has almost none of that. The beginning, such as it is, was the purchase of the cabins. There is no end in sight. Instead, the show is all middle. It’s the slow process of digging out a floor, constructing a chicken coop, replacing slate roof tiles. It’s long drone shots of gorgeous scenery, accented with spare music.
In 2009, the Norwegian national television station NRK began an experiment, broadcasting the seven-hour train ride from Bergen to Oslo stations. The show became an unexpected hit and spawned a new movement called “slow TV,” which is exactly what it sounds like. There are slow TV shows about reindeer migration, traveling the Northern Passage, and many train lines. There’s one called “Piip Show,” which is birds and squirrels eating seeds on a tiny diner set. Just to repeat: the concept is a scaled-down diner where birds and squirrels eat. Does that sound like a good show to you? It does to me, too.
Doolard’s project is obviously rooted in slow TV. Its meditative pace requires almost nothing of the viewer. The stakes are low. Character development is non-existent. Martijn seems like a good guy, but we know almost nothing about his personal life. Nor do we particularly care. What matters is the setting and the work. If you pitched this concept to any American television executive, not only would you not sell the show, you would never get a meeting with that executive again. Yet Doolard’s episodes get hundreds of thousands of views, more than, say, a typical episode of “Anderson Cooper,” at a cost of practically nothing more than the equipment he shoots on, and the time they take to edit.
Slow TV will never replace traditional story structure. Martijn Doolaard is never going to show up on HBO on Sunday evening at nine o’clock. But it’s worth noting that sometimes simplicity and elegance trounce manufactured drama. Sometimes you want a King Lear morality tale about ungrateful children squabbling over their family media empire. But sometimes you want to spend an hour watching a guy dig a trench.
This terrible strike is going to drag on for months. Soon the actors’ union will join them and, maybe, the directors. Thousands of ancillary tradespeople: the carpenters and grips and drivers and caterers will suffer. In the end, everybody except those at the top will be bloodied from this mess. Eventually, the lights will get turned back on, somebody will call “action” and we’ll all get back to work on making the stories people love.
What distinguishes good work from bad, in any art form, is the creator’s singular vision. That can’t be negotiated in a boardroom. It can’t be spit out by an algorithm. It’s people. Just people. Artists making something, fast or slow, alone or in collaboration. The process is hard and often ends in failure. But sometimes, like with this weird Dutch dude up in the mountains, it results in something beautiful.
Watch Martijn Doolaard here.
You've not got this entirely right. The great thing Martijn is building is not the cabin, but himself. You say there's no character development and we don't care about Martijn personally, but that's the actual golden ticket. When people like Martijn share elements of their life like this (his cabin project) online they're giving other people a chance to become emotionally invested in the outcome and the person foremost. Through the camera lens, it's a chance to feel, to give a damn. Human connection (even asymmetrical) is the engine of YouTube (and all good stories). The beginning, middle, and end you say he hasn't got in his episodes, it is very much there over short chapters between videos, between the short stays of random guests (each as they find the place, and then leave, in some way affected), and over the larger story arc of his life. There's a million little stories being told across many facets of this project (each chicken has its owns story, the turn of the seasons, the leaves, a story itself). The pace of the overall project and the video edit just has to be slowed down enough to let the viewer see that (that's perhaps the real magic of "slow TV," to appreciate the smaller plot points of life, to imbue meaning in the everyday). People are watching to invest themselves in his human story, for a time here on the Italian mountainside. Martijn lets them care, that's all it takes as an artist. The viewer wants to love you, to feel something; you must not impede them. And I won't say he's "dressed like a peasant," he's quite careful with his appearances, to marvelous effect in my view. Among the many captivating features of Martijn's work, he seems to have an innate sense for the cinematography, the shot composition and movement, the lighting, even basic sound design, and his physical frame/posture tells a story itself. We are watching the wear and tear of life, each day with new work, life is worn into this man's frame, his form evolved. We watch him handle tools to varied effect, the intensity and frustration of growing tired over the day, the throwing down of a hammer in exhaustion. In the small motions of his being, I find the greatest story to witness. I am grateful. He's a graphic designer learning to (sometimes incorrectly) build/re-fit a cabin; that willingness to be slightly vulnerable as he learns how to do this work is part of the appeal. As well, it must be noted, Martijn's videos, with the many young guests, often men, who show up to lend a hand in the build, show us something communal and fraternal, and reflect a broader ambition of his (felt by many), for the hours of his labour to be emotionally rewarding in a way that is increasingly lost to humans (sitting in offices, staring at screens), "to be tired in his hands," I think is how he expressed it at one point. His appeal, is that we are all yearning for something, Martijn is doing for himself to find that peace, and we are all immensely fortunate to be given this chance to observe the movements of him and the hours of his life though such beautifully crafted visual portraits. You can't make TV like this, just as the clothes don't make the man, it's something already within him (and you'll see that in every frame of motion).
And as you said at the end, it is the artist's vision (or perhaps nature struggling to find expression, rather than always a singular vision) that makes great work. You've not fallen in love with a TV show, we've all fallen in love with this man.
Not exactly similar, but I always point to The Great British Bake Off (aka Baking Show) as an example of something different, that I yearn for more of, that has met with success in the US market. It is reality TV competition sans conflict. It is peaceful and fun. The contestants help each other and are happy for each other and build friendships. Someone wins, and it's very exciting for them. Nobody gets mad, nobody fights. The hosts engage in wholesome banter. Maybe somebody earns a handshake!
Somehow it manages to be very engaging, even addictive, while also remaining extremely pleasant at all times. I feel better and more relaxed after having watched it, not drained or agitated.