The view, admittedly, was fantastic. If you have never been to Norway, you must understand it is blessed with an overabundance of staggering landscapes. Glaciers tend to leave dramatic geology in their wake, and Norway is no exception: Soaring granite mountains drop straight down into the sea; waterfalls plunge 300 feet through scree fields and terraced alpine meadows; everywhere you look there are clusters of rocky islands and impossibly cute red farmhouses poised on the crook of some bluff. Think coast of Maine meets Yosemite meets Tolkien. After a day or two navigating these panoramas, one becomes so desensitized to the utter stunningness of it all that you begin to take just another spectacular sea-and-mountain vista for granted, even if this same vista in the United States would instantly become a national park.

Despite being only 150,000 square miles (about the size of Montana), the country boasts one of the most undulatory coastlines in the world, measuring an astonishing 64,000 miles long. (By comparison the entire coast of the United States is 95,471, according to the National Ocean Service.) Unsurprisingly, the Norwegian coastline is essential to the country’s identity — and not just because of the country’s primary industries of fishing and offshore drilling. A line of skerries — essentially small, uninhabited rocky reefs — creates a naturally protected coastal passage all the way to the North Cape and gives rise to the country’s name: Nor-way means “the way north” in Old Norse. Studying Norway’s ragged coast, with its hundreds of thousands of islands, is like studying the country’s metaphorical DNA: It is unique; it is unendingly complex; it is the fingerprint of a nation.

But what’s fascinating is that the view from the Hurtigruten’s panorama lounges is also very slow. As in: very, very slow. Despite once upon a time being billed as the “coastal express,” the Hurtigruten actually travels at a maximum speed of around 15 knots, which is about the speed of a brisk bicycle ride. So you really have time to linger on every skerry, every shoal, every little red farmhouse.

This protracted (and mediated) narrative pace mirrors a baffling trend taking place in Norwegian television called Slow TV. In 2009, the public television station NRK broadcast a six-hour, 22-minute uninterrupted train trip from Bergen to Oslo by mounting a camera on the front of the locomotive. NRK had modest expectations for viewership, but the show became an overnight sensation — approximately 20 percent of all Norwegians tuned in to the train ride at some point. One 76-year-old viewer, upon arrival of the train in Oslo, forgot that he was not actually a passenger himself, and when he got up to fetch his overhead luggage he crashed into his living room curtains.

NRK followed this up two years later with an even slower program, “Hurtigruten Minute for Minute,” in which the entire 134-hour coastal journey was broadcast live. After a relatively subdued departure from Bergen, the show began to steadily gather viewers, such that by the third or fourth day, entire towns were coming out to greet the camera. People dressed up in ridiculous Norwegian costumes; marching bands serenaded the boat’s arrival and departures; one opportunistic local politician announced her candidacy on the show by unfurling a giant banner across the quay. The last day of the trip the queen of Norway even waved to the ship from her royal yacht. The program became a bona fide national event — half the country watched the voyage at some point. I made a habit of asking almost every Norwegian I met why they thought Slow TV was so popular in Norway. Most of them gave me highly unsatisfactory answers — they said that Norwegians were simply “patriotic” or that they found the shows “relaxing.” I explained to them that many people were patriotic or wanted to relax, but this did not mean they would sit down and watch a train for six hours.

I began to develop a more robust hypothesis about what attracted Norwegians in particular to Slow TV after speaking with Sverre Andreas Rud, the MS Trollfjord’s first officer. He was showing me around the ship’s impressive bridge, demonstrating how the boat’s giant twin propellers could rotate 360 degrees and turn the boat on a dime, which is convenient for some of the smaller harbors.