When I was younger, I loved to watch reality competitions on TV. I would spend my Wednesday nights watching Survivor, my Sunday nights watching The Amazing Race, and during the summer my free time catching up on Big Brother. As I got older and my workload increased, I stopped watching those shows due to lack of time. I often longed for the times where I could sit down with my family on a school night and relax while watching a bunch of 20-year-olds fight for their right to stay on the island.
This past weekend, I was introduced to The Circle, a reality TV competition on Netflix. My roommates and I were about to start watching the second season of the show. Out of all of them, I was the only one who hadn’t seen the first season. Even though I have only seen the first couple of episodes, I honestly love the show and I wanted to talk about why I think everyone should be watching it.
- The Concept of the Show
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I believe the concept of the show is genius. Eight individuals are put into separate rooms where they must create an online profile that is either false or true to their identity. You never really know who the person behind the screen is and I think that this show does a good job at portraying that. Plus it is so funny to see how the catfishes do and how they are able to fool the rest of the circle who are playing as themselves.
While the end goal of the circle is to be the last one to not be blocked, the players take it upon themselves to try and get the catfishes out because they believe that the people who are playing as the real players should win. There are alliances formed that stay standing strong and ones that fall apart within one episode. It is kind of crazy to witness, yet you can’t stop watching.
- The Competition
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To pass the time during the day when the contestants aren’t talking to each other via screen, they must participate in competitions. Depending on the competition, contestants can reveal things that others don’t want to be revealed. For instance, there are some challenges in which players are asked to give their opinions of another player. Sometimes the competitions are purely fun, and solely involve pancakes or crayons. Either way, the competitions are very entertaining and make watching The Circle that much better.
- The Influencers
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In order to figure out which players are getting eliminated every couple of days, the players are asked to rank each other. The two highest-ranked contestants, who are now called influencers, are brought to separate rooms as they communicate via screen to figure out which player they both believe should be “blocked” from the circle. Sometimes, they can agree on who should be the eliminated player, but other times, tension is created by disagreement between the two influencers. This concept is interesting to me because we rarely see elimination that is decided by contestants on reality television.
If these three reasons aren’t enough to convince you, then I don’t know what is. This show is so entertaining and if you have any free time, I urge you to watch it. That’s all I have for now and happy watching, collegiettes!