‘Through the trees’ sends BVs on a retreat in the green, but it is difficult to believe their fairy tale

If a well-known Flemish person is locked up in a forest and there is no one around to hear what he is doing, does the BV make a sound? Yes, as it turns out, and not just a little bit. Thanks to the new TV show Through the trees we finally know the answer to this philosophical riddle. Every week a BV is left in an idyllic forest hut for three days. The camera records how the BVs are engaged. They mainly do this by chatting loudly to themselves, until this well-known human species inevitably becomes emotional and a tear is shed. Mission accomplished.

Admittedly, it is an ungenerous reading of this VRT 1 programme. There are worse ways to start your week than forest bathing for forty minutes while someone contemplates life. Actress Lynn Van Royen really had something to say about her difficult adolescence and how she views it today as a parent of three children. It was different when Dieter Coppens rubbed himself in the eyes a week earlier at the thought that “time flies”. “Come on”, we wanted to shout at our screen, “poser”.

There is something to it Through the trees that evokes recalcitrance. That has less to do with Coppens than with the sum of the whole: it is the strings that well up when the BV achieves an emotional breakthrough, the lights in the trees that twinkle so cutely, the abundant drone shots of pine forests… It is orchestrated vulnerability , the kind of TV that aims to make the viewer say, “That’s now not schone mind”

Through the trees doesn’t make it easy to go along with that. You wonder how many cameramen are sneaking around the grounds and how spontaneous those outpourings really are. Maybe it’s just us, but if we me-time we will not start a solo performance of the Radio 1 program Touch. The fact that the program presents itself as a fairy tale does not prevent those kinds of questions from running through your mind.

There is the forest hut itself, which is discovered under the light of a lantern. Such a house, hidden in the greenery, is the perfect symbol of disconnection and introspection. If there was any doubt about this, the voice-over removes it: “Not connected to the smartphone, but to real life.” But, as the devil on our shoulder retorts, don’t expensive wellness retreats promise the same thing? As if the essence can only be found outside the everyday. That is precisely why Lynn Van Royen is so difficult when her stay is over. She must return home, where her family and work await her. In short: real life. The fairy tale could not last.