In January of 2020 – three months before COVID-19 came to Oklahoma City – I spent a week with my best friend in Austin, Texas, while we were both waiting for our spring semesters to start. My friend, his fiancé and I spent several lazy days pondering post-grad life and our unknowable futures. All the while, we became enamored with the Netflix reality series, “The Circle,” which transported us to a world free from the momentum and pace of our reality.
In short, “The Circle” follows up to 12 people in a personality social media contest for the chance to win $100,000. Each contestant is restricted to a personalized apartment where they are isolated for weeks on end, or as long as they stay in the game. They cannot see the other contestants, and they cannot hear the other contestants. Their only platform to communicate is a series of speech-to-text chatrooms in a constructed social media app called “The Circle.”
In “The Circle,” contestants are allowed to take on any persona they wish. They can play themselves, or they can adopt a false persona. Sometimes that persona is a friend or relative, sometimes it is a fictional character made up from a random person’s photos.
The goal of the game is to become the most popular. Every couple of in-show days, the contestants each rate all of the members of the circle. The top two rated people become “influencers.” It is their job to eliminate one player from the circle and out of the game. At the end of the show, there is one last ranking, and the first-place player in that ranking is the winner of the $100,000.
Over the course of 12 episodes leading up to that finale – released over three weeks – each contestant, as whomever they present as, participate in a collection of conversations. Every once in a while, the circle will bring the contestants into some variation of a “get-to-know-you” game, but generally, the structure of the show is up to the contestants. This segment is where the show truly shines.
The magic of “The Circle” is the dissonance between the intended drama and the reality of human psychology. The show was marketed as a gossip-trip, flirty mash of very different personalities. The first episode of the 2020 season presents as such. We meet a collection of characters who all appear to fit nicely into the traditional TV narrative. There are young hot singles from various corners of the country, a couple of “nerds” and a couple of “catfishes,” or people playing someone other than themselves.
The way the show sold itself, it was to be expected that the “influencers” would likely be the contestants best at playing the “social media” games. Contestants came in choosing their best-looking photos and flirted with anyone who would let them. Meanwhile, the narrator emphasized the elusiveness of the “catfishes” and gave the audience the impression that one of the goals of the game would be to find and reveal the “catfishes” because they were lying to the rest of the group.
The first episode of the show mostly followed the intended structure. Two of the more charismatic players won the influencer title, and they eliminated the third-place contestant, who they saw as a threat later in the game. The second episode is when everything changed.
The last place contestant on episode one was a skinny software engineer named Shubham Goel. Instead of posting his hottest pictures and flirting with the other contestants, he embraced a strategy of honesty and kindness. From the beginning, he never tried to play the system and instead attempted to build relationships with as much authenticity as possible over chat.
In the first episode, his strategy failed, and he found himself in last place. Over the course of the second episode, however, his luck began to change. The other contestants latched onto his willingness to create friendships and found solace when speaking to him. By the end of episode two, the contestants voted again, and he was ranked first. From that point on, he was always ranked as one of the top two players up to the very end of the show, when he was ranked second place, to the winner, Joey Sasso.
Shubham built a group of friends from the first episode, who all dove headfirst into his technique. That group of friends is what built the foundation of the show, and what charmed me and my friends.
Shubham wasn’t the first person on a reality TV show to attempt to transcend the trashiness of their show, but I don’t know if it as ever been done more successfully. The reason might have to do with the format. By locking each contestant up in their room for up to a month, they inadvertently put emotional strains on their contestants separate from game itself. Throughout the show, contestants show signs of intense boredom, loneliness and eventually agitation towards the game. By the final four episodes, it becomes clear that most of the contestants aren’t super upset when they’re eliminated, and instead feel relief from their release.
The only form of entertainment, and the only interaction any of them have is in “The Circle” itself, which is what makes the authenticity so important. After a couple weeks, the contestants no longer had the strength to put of a wall when talking to the other players. They had no choice but to show everyone who they really were, on an emotional level, because any connection is better than no connection.
All social circles, professional or otherwise, are built on personas. The way we act around others is always an incomplete picture. The reason my friends and I loved the show so much is because it showed a world where strangers could get to know each other in a way where the only option is to be kind and be interested.
Unbeknownst to us, only a few months later, the entire world would become a game of “The Circle.” For nearly half a year, many of us never spoke to anyone outside of our pod in real life, and social media became our platform for communication and connection.
There were many horrors during the pandemic, but perpendicular to that were many miracles. New friendships sprouting up over Facebook, social movements developing around Twitter and new communities forming in Zoom.
When life gave us no other option, we chose to be authentic and to be kind. The same thing happened on “The Circle.” Just like the contestants, I will be relieved when this is all over, but also just like the contestants, I hope I don’t forget what I learned.
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