I was lured into “Terrace House” by rumors of its unusual tranquillity.
The series, which originated on Japan’s Fuji TV, in 2012, and is now
co-produced by Fuji and Netflix, is a reality show marked by the absence
of showiness. The episodes, calm as Quaker meetings, drift along at a
naturalistic pace. Three men and three women move into an elegant pad
for a spell, while otherwise conducting their lives as usual. The
members of the cast are above average in their camera-readiness and
their civility, and in no other discernible way. If the producers
massage their interactions with an eye toward creating conflict, they do
so with the subtlest hand the genre has ever seen. Rather, the show’s
slow-burning action is sparked by the honest friction of minor
personality flaws and conflicting personal needs. The show is closer to
a nature documentary than to the exploitation films that one has come to
expect from reality television. It serves voyeurism of a genial scope.
No one is “here for the wrong reasons,” as the saying goes: the
housemates are not hustling to advance careers as quasi-celebrities at
the expense of the program’s putative integrity. The whole endeavor is
in the spirit of a junior year abroad. Its hot tub is not a horny
medical-waste container; it is just a hot tub. No one is voted out of
the house, but people sometimes elect to leave. And although no flareups
or meltdowns proceed from the intemperate consumption of rotgut in red
Solo cups, it does happen, in the new season, that a twenty-six-year-old
woman, seven beers into her evening, initiates a confrontation with one
of her male roommates. But her purpose is to express frustration with
his immaturity, and her eventual tears are the selfless blubbering of a
disappointed friend, not the hot sob of an emotional exhibitionist.
Whenever the viewer of “Terrace House” begins gliding too deeply into
his trance—lapsing into a sober meditation on his own selfhood, for
instance—a panel of Japanese celebrities pop up to comment on the
action. These presenters, who include actors, models, and comedians,
inhabit a studio styled like the catalogue display of a contemporary
living room and, in their sock feet, trade commentary and supply
critique. There is, in this, something of the post-game analyses that
follow “Real Housewives” episodes on Bravo, though without quite the
same boozy-brunch tang.
The new season, subtitled “Opening New Doors,” ushers its stars into a
building in Japan’s mountainous Nagano Prefecture, where a resplendence
of autumn leaves gives way to snow falling among bare branches, as
captured in reality-TV cinematography of a lushness rarely seen since
“The Hills” left MTV. The roommates are half-formed people plugging away
through a second adolescence, like twentysomethings everywhere. The
exception is Takayuki, a thirty-one-year-old professional snowboarder
with a sideline in technical apparel; when the presenters call him
“yakitori guy,” they are likening him to a wizened and winsome chef
dutifully skewering grilled meat—I think. For the Western viewer, one
pleasure of “Terrace House” is to grope toward its idiom.
The anti-star of the season is Yuudai, a nineteen-year-old with the
ambition of becoming a chef. More precisely, he harbors ambitions to
develop ambition. At his first turn in the kitchen, he composes a
flavorless hot pot. On his first night in his loft bed, he reveals that
his regular nocturnal companions are a pair of IKEA panda bears. “I talk
to them in my mind sometimes,” he says. Also, he kisses them, “just
casually.” His grandmother sent in his application for his show. To be
kind, we would call him undeveloped. To be more exact, we might join the
presenters in judging Yuudai, seen stalking an outlet mall with his
father’s credit card in hand, as an incipient “deadbeat,” but we would
then remember that he has yet to have the opportunity to grow up.
Yuudai has eyes for Ami, a twenty-year-old university student with a
major in economics and a minor chance of achieving success as a
professional model. His gently inept courtship would be awkward in any
circumstances; played out at a “Terrace House” pace, it is excruciating.
We see a date play out in dreadfully uneventful detail. We see the other
dudes not quite get through to him in their polite discouragement of the
pursuit. We hear Ami recounting the misadventure to her college friends
at lunch, and we listen, nodding in assent, as the presenters rehash the
matter. The tranquillity of “Terrace House” here transforms into
agonizing tension. It’s quiet, then it’s too quiet, and the viewer can
hear the murmur of his own regrets and worries.
Meanwhile, a romance blossoms. Shion, twenty-two, is a model given to
asking, beneath his bangs, through his owlish eyeglass lenses, “Do you
have a goal?” Tsubasa, twenty-four, can readily answer: her goal is to
earn a place on the national hockey team. Who could not be charmed by
the tenderness between them as they share a footbath at a hot spring?
Back in the studio, one of the presenters ventures, “They will be our
oasis.” A refuge within a refuge, a still pool serving a sunny
reflection.
Sourse: newyorker.com
