Watching television news after 7 p.m. on almost any night, Bill Haslam says, is “unbearable, or at least it is for me. Because it’s just totally, ‘I’m trying to get you to be as outraged as you can about the things that I already know that you’re outraged about.’”

Haslam is like many Americans who are exhausted after half a dozen years of nonstop political conflict and news cycles that bleed from one into another and another. Unlike most Americans, Haslam and his friend Phil Bredesen are trying to offer some counterprogramming.