Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
When we talk about streaming culture, we’re usually enthusing about what’s new, but one of the best things about streaming is how it’s made old and obscure cult hits available to a new generation. Presenting Cult Corner: your weekly look into hidden gems and long-lost curiosities that you can find on streaming.
We all know the beats of reality TV. A bunch of strangers come together under the flimsy premise of a competition or the promise of co-habitation. Those strangers then latch onto producer-coaxed tropes, thereby increasing the onscreen drama while flattening every person to a one-dimensional caricature. It’s a formula that makes for some truly addicting television. However, one Netflix Original throws all those rules out the window, and the result is incredible.
Terrace House: Boys and Girls in the City is essentially a Japanese version of The Real World. Six strangers are forced to live in a house together. They’re allowed to leave the house to go to work, school, or hang out with their friends, but they have to live at Terrace House. However, as Polygon’s Justin McElroy details in his impassioned take on how Terrace House fixes reality TV, the contestants of this show never fall into cartoonish tropes. They’re allowed to be human.
There’s something oddly comforting about watching a group of strangers live together. There are no nefarious plots or steamy late-night public hookups that will make the rest of the house gag. For the most part, everyone in Terrace House is trying their best to be a good person and a good roommate. In a television landscape that’s overcrowded with manufactured drama, there’s something charmingly wholesome about that simplistic approach.
However, that’s not to say that Terrace House is boring. The show features a panel of Japanese comedians that do a good job at lightening up the more mundane elements of the show. But, because the series is such a calm and sweet one, when there is drama, oh my god do you feel it. If you watch Terrace House for just one reason, you should watch it for the meat crime. Basically, it boils down to this: Uchi was saving some expensive cuts of meat for a special occasion, but one night, Uchi’s girlfriend Minori eats the meat without his permission. That’s all that happens, but Uchi loses his mind. There are tears involved, closed doors, the couple has a heartfelt discussion about their relationship — it’s real, and it’s great.
Terrace House accomplishes something that most American shows no longer even mess with: it’s an accurate reflection of reality. Most roommate fights don’t stem from being cheating on or slapping your enemy. They boil down to little moments that are huge to you but stupid to everyone else. Nit-picking fights about whose turn it was to take out the trash, what color you should paint the living room, who’s supposed to pay for takeout — those are the dramas of real life. Terrace House is able to capture these small, petty moments while somehow transforming them into engaging television.
