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This the true story of six strangers picked to live in a house, have their lives taped ... and be very polite toward each other.
“Terrace House: Boys and Girls in the City,” a Japanese reality show streaming on Netflix, is a quieter, more pleasant foil to anyone who grew up on a steady diet of drunken conflict and love-triangle drama on “The Real World” or “Big Brother.”
The setup will be familiar to reality TV fans: a group of beautiful strangers live in a luxurious house together. There are communal showers, alcohol, a pool. Despite this, the attitudes and manufactured drama that hallmark so many favorites are absent.
In the first episode, the crew meets each other, punctuating each greeting with a bow and an assurance that they look forward to living with one another. Whereas most reality shows lean on tropes like challenges or monetary rewards to heighten the stakes, the cameras here follow the crew as they go ... grocery shopping. We watch as they navigate a supermarket, commenting on the price of ingredients as they go. Over dinner, they discuss their respective schedules — in another turn from other popular shows, the “cast members” still go to their typical jobs.
Reality show contestants on other shows are often cut off from the outside world during filming, as many former “Bachelor” franchise members have mentioned, which means no listening to music, reading books or magazines, or accessing the internet. It’s a rule that allows for on-screen personalities to become totally restless — and more susceptible to unnecessary conflict, spurred on by producers.
On U.S. television screens, we’re well-conditioned to expect endless debauchery and oversized personalities in our reality stars. As Liz Raiss put it on Fader, “Put an equal number of shameless and generally unemployable men and women in an extravagant house together with an unlimited booze budget and a hot tub, and watch them ruin the possibility of ever living normal lives again, one episode at a time.”
It’s a trope that’s so overcooked at this point it feels bland. Another brawl between two drunken college students? Eh. Name-calling and shoving over unwashed dishes? I’ll pass. But “Terrace House” offers a glimpse into what reality TV could become.
Some might chalk up the show’s style to cultural differences between the U.S. and Japan, but it would be a danger to stereotype all of the former’s cultural offerings as loud and brash and the latter’s as exceedingly polite and meek. Maybe “Terrace House” shouldn’t be viewed as a purer, superior alternative to hellish shouting matches and lovers’ quarrels on American screens — just something unique and refreshing to come out of a genre that seemed to be mined of all originality.
“Terrace House” as a franchise has existed in Japan since 2012, but moved to Netflix in the fall of 2015, which is when “Boys and Girls in the City” premiered. The episodes have been hanging out on the streaming service for months — as a somewhat regular Netflix user, I never saw this original touted and promoted like “Gilmore Girls” and “Jessica Jones” was. I finally learned about the show via “Rose Buddies,” a “Bachelor” recap podcast (and accompanying Facebook group). Hosts Griffin and Rachel McElroy recapped “Terrace House” on their Dec. 6 episode (they are, as we all are, waiting for “The Bachelor” to begin again).
As Griffin put it, “if you think it’s not going to be your jam, I guarantee you, it’s going to be your jam.”
Even the opening “Terrace House” scene feels so calm and measured in comparison to the producer-fueled mix of personalities that came together on “Jersey Shore,” or even “The Bachelor.” An interesting theme that emerges when you turn to the internet for chatter about episodes like this is how perplexed viewers seem to be when they discuss their enjoyment of the show.
A Reddit user posted these thoughts nearly a year ago:
I usually loathe anything reality based but for some reason this show has my attention. I don’t even know why. It’s just a bunch of 20 year olds hanging out with each other and talking and building chemistry. I think it has to do with how genuine it is. Nothing is forced.
Meanwhile, in Justin McElroy’s writeup of the show on Polygon, he explained the appeal of the non-drama as such:
Take, for example, a three-minute scene devoted to unwashed dishes. While American viewers might brace for that sort of issue to devolve into a drunken screaming match, the residents of Terrace House make their displeasure known and then — this is the really revolutionary part — resolve it like actual adult humans who care about those around them.
If that sounds boring, I assure you, it is infinitely more fascinating than watching artificially constructed brawls that parallel my own life experience about as much as the WWE.
There’s a simplicity to the premise of “Terrace House” that I find I enjoy in the same way I select my podcasts: Sometimes, it’s just nice to hear from a person going through day-to-day life. It feels like a friendly eavesdropping of a mildly interesting conversation between friends: listening in, I see a glimpse of lives that are, writ large, not too different from mine in terms of the traditional youth-school-secondary education-job trajectory, but is compelling in its novelty.
After a year during which conflict and bad news dominated conversations, on-screen drama doesn’t feel like an escape ― just more noise. At the risk of leaning too hard on the idea that we need calm at the end of a turbulent and hard 2016, I’d suggest this sleeper (at least in America) Netflix hit. If you get a strange thrill at peeking at the mundane moments in the lives of a few strangers, this Netflix offering could be a calm antidote to the stressful holiday season.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misattributed the Polygon Terrace House article to Griffin McElroy.
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