Let me try and describe how this works.
Eight complete strangers, find themselves in eight separate apartments, facing off with one another by way of a social media platform called The Circle. The players aren’t allowed to meet each other in real life. They have no access to the outside world. They aren’t given any other information about each other except for what they choose to put on their profiles. The aim is to befriend, and flirt, and catfish their way to becoming an influencer where they will be granted the power to block one individual and boot them out of the game. The last person standing will win 100,000 dollars.
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to your front row seat to the end of society as we know it.
The Circle, which first premiered on England’s Channel 4 in 2018, has now been adapted by Netflix into what they’re calling a “three-week event”. (The Circle France and The Circle Brazil are coming soon!) These 12 episodes, built around the premise of how far someone would go to be popular on social media, is essentially a mashup of Big Brother and Black Mirror.
And while the premise comes across as being somewhat repulsive, the show itself is really rather clever in the way it sets things up. Unlike other reality television, it doesn’t have to do very much to direct its players towards drama or conflict. Everyone playing the game knows what social media is and how it works. They’ve come in with certain preconceived notions about how one can and should behave when blessed with the shroud of anonymity, and when given the opportunity to reimagine themselves and be anyone they want to be.
We humans are, by nature, judgmental little shits. Happily forming opinions and jumping to conclusions based on the most limited information. A photo. A relationship status. An emoji. The Circle builds on this belief. On the idea that there is something inherent about the way social media taps into the very worst side of our humanity. That no matter how good our intentions, that there is something intoxicating about the toxicity of being online.
We see this play out almost immediately. One of the players, Shubham, enters The Circle with the most noble intentions. He sneers at the idea of “influencers”, he laments how fake people are on social media, before promising to be the truest version of himself. As you can probably imagine, all of this goes out the window in spectacularly fast fashion, and it isn’t long before he too is “playing the game”.
That being said, the most pleasantly surprising thing about The Circle is that none of the players are, in any way, mean spirited. Not even the catfishers. They’re all really quite sweet. Self-involved, egocentric, and opportunistic exhibitionists, but sweet all the same. Which seems to be the point of the experiment. Not to artificially create conflict by putting a bunch of assholes together in a confined space and constantly poking them in the wrong direction. But rather to see how everyday people would react under a particular set of circumstances.
The execution of all of this, however, still requires some fine tuning. Because engaging on social media is very much a solitary endeavour and not a group activity, there is the problem of how to make it exciting for a television audience. On how to show and not tell. Using voice-activation as they do in The Circle is probably the best – and least complicated – approach, but even that gets a little tiring after a while. There are some moments of great posturing, like when one player tells The Circle to add more i’s to her “hi” in order to come across as friendly and cool. But mostly, the snail’s pace to every interaction, slows down the action so much that it results in disinterest.
The best way to approach The Circle is probably the same way we’d approach social media. Just leave it running in the background, letting it do its thing, while we check in from time-to-time to see if anything exciting has happened.
What’s particularly frightening about The Circle lies in its setup. Individuals who spend days on end with no actual interaction with the outside world. They spend their days aimlessly walking around their respective apartments, talking to themselves and to an all-seeing, all-knowing screen. They’re being watched and recorded at all times. There is no physical contact with anyone other than themselves. And without the benefit of tone or context or expression, they are forced to interpret every interaction by way of intertextual analysis. (Why did he send me a red chili pepper emoji instead of an eggplant? Is he saying that he has a small penis?)
It is a terrifying vision of the future. And one that isn’t all that removed from reality. As we continue isolate ourselves with technology. As we limit our relationships to group chats and comment streams. As we move away from calling someone to check in on them and instead send a two-word text that simply says: “u ok?”. As our every human need becomes fulfilled by Amazon drones. How long before the walls we build around us, both physical and digital, end up being our prisons.
So, do yourself a favour. Delete Instagram. Sign out of Facebook. Call some friends. Call your mother. Go outside and smell some roses. You’ll feel better about yourself. And the world. I promise.
The Circle
Netflix, Season 1, 12 Episodes
Creator: Tim Harcourt
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