Terrace House, A Deeper Dive: The Epistemology of Authenticity

How do we know what is real?

More particularly, how do we know what is real on reality TV shows?

In one sense, the question is absurd because the experience of watching TV is nothing like our natural experience of reality. The zen sociologist Bernard McGrane in his book The Un-TV and the 10 MPH Car provides a set of exercises that he assigns to his students that anyone can do to gain some insight to how our brains process TV:

·         Count the technical events (anything you would not normally see or hear standing where the camera would be) for ten minutes.

·         Watch any TV show of your choice for ten minutes without turning the sound on.

·         Watch any news program for ten minutes without turning the sound on.

·         Rather than watch TV, watch someone watch TV for 15 minutes.

·         Watch television for 30 minutes without turning it on.

I found this last exercise particularly enlightening: it's very easy to watch TV for 30 minutes with it on, and it's excruciating to watch it for 30 minutes with it off. Our brains find the motion and sound and the processing of the narratives we are presented extremely satisfying to the point that we do not really need to be invested in a show to enjoy it. Since most of us have grown up with video and film, the skills needed to make sense of it are almost entirely unconscious. We would not want TV to be authentic in that sense. We would not watch a version of Terrace House which was an unedited 24-hour feed of the table camera, for instance.

And so we seek a different kind of authenticity in the shows we watch, and we seek a more particular kind of authenticity in reality TV. We want the people on our reality TV to be autonomous agents living their own lives, making their own decisions and making their own mistakes as if the cameras just happened to be there.

And that, of course, is impossible at least to a certain degree. Cameras often need operators, and camera operators are particularly necessary to get the beautiful, narrow depth of focus shots we enjoy on Terrace House. That means that the places filmed need to staged at least to a certain extent, and the cast has wait for and accommodate that staging. Their interactions cannot always be as natural and spontaneous as they are presented. Once things are set up, the housemates may be able to ignore the cameras and crew, but it's hard to forget they are there, and some housemates never do get used to it. They even talk a bit about this fact with Chie in Boys x Girls Next Door for that extra dose of meta that we've come to love in Terrace House.

But at least they do not have script, right? "No script at all": that's the promise, isn't it?

Lauren talked a bit about her experience in an interview that slipped out briefly onto the internet but was shortly taken down, but, of course, reddit captured the relevant sections for posterity. She's being hyperbolic when she says, "It was non-scripted, but at the same time it was extremely scripted;" however, it is pretty clear that the housemates are prompted by production if not in the moment then in briefings before they start shooting. It's not surprising: reality TV shows have to have some amount of direction, and other shows have been known to use scripts and routinely have cast members recreate interactions which were off camera for whatever reason.

So we cannot even have an entirely unscripted show. Is there a lower bar that a reality TV show which is can be cleared? Can we at least expect the housemates not to lie to us about what they are shown doing on the show? 

Anyone who has watch Boys x Girls In the City to the end knows the answer to that one. Hayato and Riko clearly portrayed their disinterest in each other for the cameras while they were meeting regularly to at least make out. Does the fact that the incident was shown on camera make Terrace House more authentic or less authentic? On the one hand, the production showed what was going on once they learned of it. On the other, it happened, and there's no reason to think that similar things are happening all the time and not getting revealed either because production does not know or does not wish to present it.

And so the epistemology of authenticity for reality TV ultimately comes down to the motivations and actions of the cast. Can we trust that the person being presented is an accurate portrayal of that person even when that portrayal might not be in their own best interest? We see various levels of the ability to inhabit a persona for the screen, and various strategies used to control that persona and what gets revealed. It is easy to identify the worst: Cheri, Wez, and Yuudai. But what if even the vaunted housemates like Han-san, the first Mizuki or Hana were just more successful but equally fake constructs?

It's all a matter of trust. 

We face the same issue in our day-to-day lives. We cannot know another's subjective experience. We cannot be fully certain that people are who they say they are even in our most intimate relationships. All we can do is to see how well people's actions over time align with how they present themselves. And the same thing holds for the people on a reality TV. Only one of the first 21 seasons of the Bachelor resulted in a genuine relationship. On the other hand, if Taishi and Chikako were faking it for the publicity, they seem to be taking the bit further than one might expect. 

We cannot trust reality TV. We cannot know the extent to which events on Terrace House or any similar shows are true to the inner lives and motivations of the cast and how much are driven by producers. The evidence is that Terrace House is relatively authentic. Yes, producers are prompting the housemates at least for the narration they need if not the narratives they have devised. Yes, venues events are staged. Yes, the footage is edited to tell cleaner and clearer story-lines than actually occurred. But I do believe that many of the housemates behave on the show largely in similar ways to the way they behave in the rest of their lives, and that the show is largely an authentic document of at least the parts of their lives which were captured on camera. 

I still trust the show because there has been very little evidence in their lives after the show to contradict the personas which have been presented. There is many a video of Mizuki serving coffee to delighted fans. Eric has his food-truck, and so on. And even Lauren in her unexpurgated interview is behaving pretty much exactly like the Lauren we got to know in the show. We cannot know how real Terrace House is, but the subsequent behavior of the housemates suggests that it's a reasonably faithful presentation of who they were when they were on the show.