Give your TV a Viking funeral

"Well, there's your problem: too much excitement."
“Well, there’s your problem: too much excitement.”

If you thought American public television was boring, no matter how many Dowtons they Abbey, then you haven’t seen boredom. No, for true, mind-numbing hours of marathon paint-peeling, you’ll have to go to Norway.

As a follow-up to their highly rated (no, really) continuous, uninterrupted eight hours on a train and then the sequel, 134 hours on a cruise ship, Norway changed things up on Friday by airing 12 hours of a wood-burning fireplace.

And like PBS’s 11-and-a-half hours long Civil War, the fire is based on a book, Norwegian bestseller Hel Ved, which its publisher claims outsold Fifty Shades of Grey this holiday season. We don’t know if there were slow pans and zooms onto certain flames, but there was narration from “firewood specialists providing color commentary” on “burning, slicing and stacking the wood,”  along with “music and poems.”

It’s enough to make you wish they still made wood-paneled television sets.