Last January, when the reality-competition series “The Circle” premièred, on Netflix, I watched a couple of episodes before deciding to drop it. The show’s premise felt thin and watery: in an apartment building in Salford, in Greater Manchester, U.K., a group of Americans engaged in the kind of rites familiar to viewers of “Survivor,” “Big Brother,” and other “Lord of the Flies”-style reality mainstays. Competing for a hundred-thousand-dollar prize, the contestants flirted and fought, forged and broke alliances, and played games meant to sow conflict and suspicion. They ranked one another based on the metric of “popularity,” with the top contestants getting the power to “block,” or eliminate, other players. The one twist of the show was that all communication among the players—who were housed separately, in their own apartment units—took place through a social-media app called the Circle. The app, which resembled Facebook, allowed contestants to set profile pictures and post short bios, and to send direct messages and participate in group chats. This format allowed the competitors to catfish one another, with many of them attempting to win the game by posing as someone other than themselves. In the end, however, the prize went not to a catfisher but to a contestant named Joey—a good-natured, well-groomed, and well-muscled Rochester native who could do a surprisingly decent Robert De Niro impression. Though Joey chose to play the game as himself, his “Jersey Shore” mannerisms meant that he was also a retread of a well-known type.
As the coronavirus swept across the United States last spring, and I suddenly found myself at home, flopping from bed to sofa and flipping from screen to screen, I occasionally wondered if, much like how “The Simpsons” had foretold the Trump Presidency, “The Circle” had managed to predict the isolation brought on by the pandemic. The series had initially seemed like a relatively anodyne critique of social media, but it now struck me as a menacing depiction of quarantine, the type of television that serves not as an escape but as a refracted mirror of the human experience. I decided to give the show another try, and, as I watched, it came to remind me, in its existential airlessness, of Sartre’s “No Exit,” with hints of Pasolini’s “Salò” (though, granted, with less overt acts of torture). I texted a friend, “Watching ‘The Circle’ feels like being on a plane with two masks on for twelve straight hours.”
This past April, the second season of the show began airing. It follows the rules laid out in the first: each contestant is, for the most part, stuck in an apartment, a padded cell with one too many throw pillows. The communication is still virtual, and the majority of it occurs over voice-dictated text, which means that much of the action consists of the players pacing in front of a screen while screaming inanities at it. “How is everyone feeling, dot, dot, dot. Is this crazy or what?” a substitute teacher named Terilisha, playing as herself, says aloud. Savannah, a saucy data researcher who is also playing as herself, dictates, “Crying emoji, heart emoji, crying emoji, heart emoji, crying emoji, heart emoji.” There are no “confessionals,” in which contestants narrate their experiences—a device, used on many other reality shows, that tends to break up the monotony. Instead, the players talk out their thought processes beat by beat, in real time. Savannah boasts that “making friends and building alliances are of the utmost importance to me, but I have no problem putting a bitch in check.” Jack, an astrophysics and economics major (and the spitting image of Cousin Greg on HBO’s “Succession”), vows to play a tactical game, posing as a sorority hottie named Emily. “I’m the ultimate wolf in sheep’s clothing,” Jack says. “When it comes to strategy, there’s no fucks given.” Chloe, a high-spirited, self-consciously ditzy player from Essex—the only non-American of the bunch—claims that, in playing herself, she’ll “get ’em all to bloody love me, so they can rank me high, and then I’ll kick ’em all out.”
Viewers might remember Chloe from another pandemic-era Netflix reality show, “Too Hot to Handle,” in which a group of svelte and horny players, locked down in a villa in Mexico, earned a cash prize if they abstained from sexual activity. With “Too Hot to Handle,” “The Circle,” and “Love Is Blind,” a dating show that also débuted in the U.S. during the early days of COVID, in which contestants initially engaged with one another through a wall, Netflix has become the source of reality entertainment whose dramatic tension depends not just on constant surveillance—a common reality-TV trope—but also on the hindrance of free and easy communication among its participants.
There is a flat, low-budget, assembly-line quality to these shows. This is especially true of “The Circle”: the red brick building in which it is shot is meant, per its architects’ Web site, to “mimic the mills of the cotton and silk weaving historically Salford was known for.” It has come to function as a factory for banging out the version of the show that is available on American Netflix, and also its various international editions. The characters are even flatter; the high-concept ploy of keeping them in a single location while separated, in some way, from one another was clearly employed in order to exert differentiating pressures on their personalities. Instead, what takes place is a smoothing out.
The messages dictated by “The Circle” ’s contestants, whether they are attempting to catfish or not, are frighteningly non-distinct. The words of Lee, a Texan author in his late fifties who poses as a twenty-four-year-old waiter named River, are not meaningfully different from those of Khat, a six-feet-seven professional volleyballer playing as herself, or from those of Lisa, a fortyish personal assistant pretending to be her own boss, the onetime ’NSync singer Lance Bass. The players speak in an only slightly more personal version of what the critic Molly Young, in a Vulture article on contemporary corporate-speak, described as meaningless, self-important “garbage language.” At one moment or another, the contestants say that they rep the “#CircleFam”; that they “build strong bonds”; that they “have each other’s back,” are “on the same page,” and are “seeing eye to eye”; that they love one another’s “energy.” When off the chat, they are usually plotting alone, planning the formation of alliances that are interchangeable but for their shifting members. The tactics are similar because so is the goal. As Courtney notes at one point, “I do want to be Khat’s friend after this—I just couldn’t be Khat’s friend in this because she was gonna cost me one hundred thousand dollars.” In “The Circle,” hell isn’t other people; it’s the prison of one’s own self.
You could argue that reality television, especially the kind that quarantines its cast throughout filming, isn’t the right place to go for true emotion or individuality—two elements that tend to lead to engrossing social dynamics. And yet a variety of stuck-in-one-house reality shows have supplied exactly that, from the many iterations of the beloved MTV series “The Real World” to the most recent season of Bravo’s “Summer House,” which, owing to COVID restrictions, followed a cadre of young professionals on lockdown in a Hamptons mansion and still managed to squeeze dramatic opportunities out of the situation.
Why hasn’t the same formula worked for Netflix? It could be poor casting, or these shows’ reliance on monologue instead of action, or it could have something to do with the streaming platform’s rapid-fire release structure, which makes a show’s elements blur together, even when a season is dropped in multi-episode batches instead of in its entirety. It could also be the times. As I sat at home, viewing the second season of “The Circle,” which finished airing a few days after the COVID-positivity rate in New York hit a six-month low, I found myself thinking, Why am I watching TV right now? I should go outside. ♦
