by Misha Fabian
Have you ever edited certain parts of your photo because you wanted to make yourself look more appealing online? Have you ever tweeted or posted something that would allow you to ride on one of the latest trends? What about trying to make friends with someone you’ve never met in person, just over the Internet? If your answer is yes to any of these questions, then you will enjoy The Circle.
If you’ve been on Netflix any time within the last month, chances are you’ve already seen the poster of this show pop up on your “suggested” box. The Circle was released on the very first day of 2020 and it has since built up its popularity as a show that people have deemed as binge-able. Now you may ask, what exactly is The Circle?
The Circle is an American reality TV competition and is being described by a lot of its viewers as “Big Brother” meets “Catfished”. This is how the competition goes: a total of eight players are selected to live in an apartment complex where each of them would have their own room. Their rooms would be fully furnished and supplied with all the players would be needing during their stay at the apartment complex. In order to win the competition, players must rank each other from highest to lowest in order to determine which players get to stay at the apartment complex for another day. The player who receives the lowest rating is “Blocked” and is out of the game. The catch? Unless authorized, players would not be allowed to leave their personal apartments and will not be able to interact with their fellow competitors face to face at any point during the competition.
The game is controlled by a specially designed app called The Circle which allows the competitors to see the social media profiles of their fellow competitors and communicate with each other via chat. That being said, if you were a competitor on The Circle, the only basis your fellow competitors have of who you are is wholly dependent on whatever it is that you show them. In The Circle, you can be anything.
Now, how you would fare on the show is based entirely on how popular you are amongst the other players. The game gives all players an edge because since they can’t really meet face to face, they all have the opportunity to craft whatever personality they would feel would help them win the game. What makes the game so intriguing is how the players are able to foster relationships based off of what they’re given through the app, and if you’ve gone far enough into the show to meet all the players, you would see exactly how people craft their personalities to become “conventional”. Eerily reminiscent of how we all represent ourselves on social media, The Circle is able to show how we have the tendency to pose things in such a way that would allow us to gain more likes. It’s reality TV with an extra emphasis on reality.
What’s in store for you when you watch The Circle? You get to see the players take on the different challenges that the app created to test their wit and skill.
Interestingly (mini spoiler alert!), some of the players in the game decided to take an authentic approach in representing themselves to other people. On the flipside, some players have decided to edit their own personas, with some of the players even going so far as to create an entirely new person! Now, to see how everything goes down, you would just have to watch it for yourself.
