What Japanese Reality TV Can Teach Overstimulated Americans
Terrace House is a Refreshing Return to Nuance and Context.
Terrace House: Boys and Girls in the City is a reality show that provides a home and a car to six participants in Tokyo. There are three boys and three girls.
…and that’s about it. There are no producer provocations. No storylines. There is, absurd as it may sound, virtually no drama. It’s the lives of six normal strangers doing some stuff, but mostly doing nothing.
Any narrative nadirs involve minor conflicts. Action sequences are subtle emotional rejections, failed baseball tryouts, pool cleaning, and cooking. Climactic scenes include trips to Costco and the cultural faux pas of eating someone else’s fancy beef. Somehow that’s not a euphemism.
I was transfixed by the novelty of this minimalist content, and thought surely I was alone. But I was wrong. Terrace House has become a sensation amongst my friends. We, mostly heavy pop culture consumers in the creative industries, are obsessed with a show that’s as exciting as watching paint dry on a wayward turtle.
What is the meaning of this? It’s not as simple as hipster irony signaling, though it is true that I didn’t love the show at first. I found it beyond boring. Inconsequential. Sterile. Difficult to follow. Each interaction is saccharine, formal, and over-scrutinized by the other characters. Every minute emotional reaction agonizingly slow. Every feeling requires interrogation. There’s so much empathy, it comes all the way full circle towards being disingenuous. It is in some ways the precise polar opposite of Real Housewives or Keeping Up With the Kardashians.
I have a Japanese friend, Arthur, who is a fan of the show. We had drinks one night and he explained the appeal.
“It’s what I call art-house reality,” he explained. “It’s quiet, it’s subtle. It’s contemplative. If you look at American content…Hollywood movies are just storytelling on steroids. This is storytelling that’s so subtle you forget its storytelling. It’s very naturalistic.”
For example, gone is the interpersonal “cutting” you’d see in American reality shows, those moments where characters complain, alone, about their roommates having sex too loudly or accidentally snorting their protein powder. These have been replaced by a panel of pseudo famous Japanese celebrities, who command a detached sense of authority that makes you listen. Since they’re removed from the show’s location, they’re much like gods on Olympus, acting as a sort of Greek Chorus. They ground us in a sort of meta-reality.
The pacing of the panel’s appearances is well done and necessary. Just as you’re dozing off because the only drama is one roommate buying a girl he likes new Nikes, they cut to the panel. You’re saved by proxy.
It’s unclear exactly where the panel is. You’re never told, and there are never any clues that might tip you off. They’re ensconced in what looks like a gay alien’s man cave. The show pays a lot of lip service to Netflix—it’s a co-production of Fuji TV and Netflix—but Netflix certainly didn’t dip into the Bright budget for these digs.
Going to back to the show’s characters, is this really a representative sample of Japanese youth? If so, life has been far too good for them. There is a nefarious undercurrent of privilege so strong that it can’t even be acknowledged. They are marvelously unambitious. They’re doing what’s expected of them without asking a single rebellious question. I can’t imagine them arguing with their parents, another polar difference from Kardashian World.
As art, Terrace House exists in a vacuum all its own. It’s a salve to the corrupt, materialistic, and often deranged visual content Americans are exposed to daily. Unlike American TV, Terrace House is unwatchable without taking the time (and it requires a lot of time) to understand nuance and context. The only way to make more banal content would be by showing characters facial expressions as they use the bathroom.
Western culture is imploding like a dying star. It has run out of ideas and is clamoring to get out of quicksand it made itself. The cultural reactions to this are as frightening as they are lacking in subtlety: six second attention spans, native content, ElsaGate and whatever the absurdist meme of the week is (this week it’s Ugandan Knuckles). We are hitting the wall, and there’s nowhere to turn other than visual deformity.
To love Terrace House may thus be a justifiable reaction against Western cultural decline. It is a return to an entertainment that relies on context; context that perhaps only those inside of a nuanced culture can truly understand. It offers solace by being odd, calm, and uninteresting—truly a show about nothing. A show that doesn’t try.
If American visual content is a blistering, neon distraction from an increasingly proximate death, Terrace House is pleasant and peaceful acceptance. A willing entry of the void. The antidote to our overstimulated minds. Do we need Terrace House? Yes. For now we do. It’s a nap instead of a snack; indeed a new sort of escapism. But after napping too long and too often, waking up just gets harder and harder.
