Netflix’s ‘Terrace House’ is a Quiet Start to Humanizing Reality Television

For many Americans, reality television is where serious content lays on its deathbed. Superficial, manufactured, and overdramatized, it appeals solely to the lowest levels of our stimulation: our base desire to see explosions in all of its definitions. This affinity towards discourse and disaster has given us The Jersey Shore, The Real World, and, of course, the ubiquitous Keeping Up With The Kardashians. Listen, I am neither a man morally sound nor pretentious enough to shame how any person chooses to relax in their limited free time but we can all agree that our current preoccupation with “let’s put a bunch of attractive people together in a house and see how many things or people they can break per hour” is much more fodder than featured content. I’ve often had this idea that the problem with American television is that it has trust issues. With its audience, with its writers, with the media itself at times. If American television was a person, it would be a perpetual ninth grader, lost in the sea of an apathetic lunch hall, thinking the only way anyone will eat with her is if she makes herself all too consumable. Japanese media, however, sings a different tune. Where the western world requires a show to cater to the widest demographic possible, a key characteristic of Japanese media is how they lean into niche markets. From steampunk anime about human-eating titans to dramas about a high school boy and girl accidentally living in the same apartment, Japan’s marketing stra…