You don’t need me to introduce you to House of Cards, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt or Arrested Development on Netflix.  I’m assuming society surely has taken care of that by now.  But I can direct your queue’s attention to a show called Terrace House.

If the new season of Orphan Black were available all at once, I would have spent the past week binging that, but since it’s not Terrace House has filled my TV void.  (And if you somehow aren’t watching Orphan Black let this be my thousandth push for you to stop your life and do so).

I came across this show somewhere in the Netflix recommendations that remain surprisingly strong in terms of bringing to my attention things I enjoy.  Terrace House is like The Real World, Jersey Shore and Big Brother had a baby, and that baby was Japanese.

Real World seasons feature seven strangers picked to live in a house together.  Terrace House has only six people (three guys, three women), all in their 20s.  There are no dumb challenges or made-up jobs.  In fact, the ones who have real-life jobs go there during the day.  The house is just the place where they happen to all live together for months as cameras roll.

The tone is strikingly different from the American reality shows.  Instead of concepts that continually try to get crazier and one-up some previous idea, this one is the calming opposite.  There is something actually a little soothing about watching people treat each other most of all with deference and respect, even when there is drama boiling under the surface.

Oh and there’s the wardrobe of cast member Minori, a model, which consistently brings random joy:

I was a little unsure during the opening minutes of the first episode if I was going to stick around.  Somewhat similar to the popular after-shows for many reality series, this one has a panel of slightly older people who talk about what’s going on, all embedded within each episode.  They pop up at the beginning and somewhere in the middle of each one, and between cracking jokes about the proceedings also provide some enlightening cultural context about why, say, a certain character might be shocked that another held her hand on their first date.

And not one person yells at another the entire time.  There’s plenty that happens, whether funny, surprising or devious (shoutout to the guy who asks all three women on dates in front of each other), but it’s refreshing to watch people react by seeking each other out for a conversation rather than screaming or threatening to beat them up (ok that last one sort of happens at one point…)

The only bad thing is that Netflix only currently has 18 episodes up, and it’s clear that more exist.  Hopefully that gets rectified, or I might have to calmly ask them to fix it.