The circle netflix
In one scene, openly bisexual Sammie scoffs at her competitor Miranda for saying she’s “mostly into men but always enjoys a pretty girl.” Talking to herself, Sammie jeers, “That’s one thing I don’t like, is girls that date men but will just have fun with a girl.because that just plays with emotions.” The latter, especially, is a big deal since several castmembers are queer.
There’s Chris, a proudly flamboyant gay man from Dallas with more energy than an auctioneer Joey, a guido mama’s boy from New York who could probably find work as a castmember in a Jersey Shore reboot and Shubham, a virtual reality designer who instantly caught my attention when he described social media as a “modern-day bubonic plague.” When contestants aren’t trying to scope out who’s real and who’s a catfish or sliding into each other’s DMs, they have frank discussions about personal things, like their home lives, their interests, and their sexualities. The house is fleshed out with a coterie of eccentric personalities that are just as reality TV-ready, if not moreso, than their duplicitous peers. Luckily, The Circle is more than just catfish. Give or take a few game-changing twists along the way, and the cycle more or less repeats itself over and over again until only one player remains. The rankings are then compiled, the top two contestants are crowned “influencers,” and they alone are given the power to “block” one person from The Circle (aka send them home). Every few days, the contestants are asked to rank their fellow competitors based on how close they feel to one another. Each contestant then uses pictures and videos they choose to create a social media profile that will serve as their only channel of communication during the competition.
A “social media competition” that Netflix touts as a “three-week must-watch event,” The Circle cherry-picks elements from other successful reality shows (namely, Big Brother and Catfish) to create something new that, on its face, seems pretty simple: A number of people move into a house, where they will spend several weeks living in individual studios, completely sequestered from everyone else in the outside world - including each other.