Since my girlfriend and I joined one another's bubbles, we've been bingeing a number of TV shows together, especially since I went to stay with her for a few weeks. The big revelation for her was the richness available on Netflix, which she doesn't subscribe to (reasoning that Xfinity is expensive enough without adding streaming). Blog posts are surely coming on the likes of Aggretsuko, Narcos: Mexico and Schitt's Creek, but the first one we got into is Terrace House.
We're both Japanophiles, which is why she was interested in it, and so we started with the latest season. This is, of course, the season with the most controversy, since a contestant committed suicide after receiving torrents of online abuse. We both had an inkling of that when we started, but decided to forge on, since it's set in Tokyo.
Our first impression was some world-weary laughter, when the panel announced in the first episode that they intended for the season to end with the start of the Tokyo Olympics - the same Olympics that have now been postponed/canceled because the coronavirus. The next thing, for me at least, was the curiously low stakes of the show.
I'm not a big connoisseur of reality TV, apart from a season of UK Big Brother back in 2004, as well as Lost (not the JJ Abrams show) and Average Joe around the same time. But it struck me how Terrace House is literally just about hanging around the house and watching the housemates get to know each other. There are no prizes or competitions, and I'm guessing people don't become big stars off it the way they do after getting on UK Big Brother or something.
That's one thing that made it good shelter-in-place watching - since we ourselves have been stuck at home just hanging out.
Of course, it's also torturous because we get to see the housemates hanging out in this lovely big house in the middle of a city we both adore, and going to restaurants with amazing-looking food. We even got inspired by one episode, where illustrator Kaori and gadabout Ruka go on an ill-fated date to this place that does Tamago Kake Rice - seeing how easy it was (just make a bowl of rice and mix an uncooked egg into it, then season), we made it ourselves.
One impression that got dispelled early on was how well-behaved the housemates were. Because western reality shows tend to choose people for how they spark (negatively) off each other, we were initially surprised at how easygoing everyone on Terrace House was, but this impression wore off as housemates started having disagreements. The best one of the newest season was between Haruka and Risako, when the latter revealed the former's crush to the guy in question. Up until then the biggest drama had been between one character who seemed not to have any goals and another who kept calling him on not specializing in either his acting or his writing or his music or his carpentry.
Since finishing that series, or at least the very abbreviated run that's available internationally after Hana Kimura killed herself, we've gone back to the season just before it, set in the woods around Nagano, and we're pleased to see that the disagreements and drama have started already.
Another interesting thing to discover was that a few non-Japanese people get on the show. When the first two people left, they were replaced by another guy and girl, and in the episode introducing them, the guy is heard speaking in a different language than Japanese. It took me a moment to realize he was speaking in... Italian?!
That guy, Peppe, became one of our favorites on the show, since he brought a lot more suaveness to the house than any of the other guys on the show, and because his story is so ridiculous. A lifelong manga lover, he decided to study it in Japan, and learned perfect Japanese to do so. Asked how he was supporting himself he said he was modeling part-time to pay the bills while he got his career as a cartoonist off the ground.
I think we can all agree this isn't the natural order of things.
Anyway, if you don't mind reading subtitles and you don't mind watching people sit around and chat for an hour or so, Terrace House is a nice chill watch. It's just too bad that it ended the way it did, and in some ways the abruptness of how its run on Netflix ends makes it a little worse - we don't see Hana appear at all, just get a card at the end of the last episode expressing condolences to her family. Though maybe seeing her last appearances wouldn't have been better?
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