I've been reviewing television for over fifteen years. I've sat through countless hours of reality show garbage, endured more seasons of dating competitions than any human should, and somehow managed to find redeeming qualities in shows that probably shouldn't exist. But nothing—and I mean nothing—prepared me for the soul-crushing experience that is Netflix's "The Circle." nothing Netflix's "The Circle." I'm writing this review not as a professional obligation, but as a public service announcement. If you're thinking about watching this show, don't. If someone recommends it to you, question their judgment. If Netflix auto-plays it while you're browsing, take it as a sign to cancel your subscription and go read a book instead. What Fresh Hell Is This? Let me paint you a picture of what passes for entertainment in 2024. "The Circle" locks a bunch of people in separate apartments, takes away all human contact, and forces them to communicate exclusively through what's basically a knockoff social media app. They post photos, write status updates, and rate each other like they're reviewing restaurants on Yelp. The winner gets $100,000, which honestly isn't enough money to compensate for the dignity they lose in the process. I've watched people eat bugs on "Fear Factor." I've seen grown adults throw tantrums over roses on "The Bachelor." But I have never witnessed anything as fundamentally depressing as watching someone spend twenty minutes crafting the perfect selfie caption to manipulate strangers they've never met. The People: Dear God, The People The contestants on "The Circle" are what happens when an entire generation grows up thinking their Instagram followers actually care about them. These aren't people—they're walking brand partnerships who've forgotten how to have a conversation that isn't performed for an invisible audience. I watched a grown man spend an entire episode debating whether to use the crying-laughing emoji or the regular laughing emoji in a message. Another contestant had what the show presented as an emotional breakthrough when she posted a makeup-free selfie. The collective IQ of the cast couldn't power a desk lamp. And the fake personas! Half these people are pretending to be someone else, which should create interesting psychological drama, right? Wrong. Instead, you get people badly impersonating other people while communicating through an interface designed by someone who clearly thinks human emotion can be adequately expressed through GIFs. My Personal Journey Through Purgatory I started watching this show with an open mind. Maybe, I thought, this could be an interesting commentary on social media culture. Maybe it would reveal something profound about how we connect in the digital age. Maybe I'd discover some hidden depth that wasn't apparent from the trailers. Three episodes in, I was hate-watching. Six episodes in, I was questioning my life choices. By the end of the first season, I was genuinely concerned about the state of humanity. The show operates on the assumption that watching people scroll through feeds is entertaining. It's not. It's like watching someone play a really boring video game while providing color commentary about their strategy for getting likes. The "drama" consists entirely of people misinterpreting text messages and forming alliances based on profile photos. The Format Makes No Sense Here's what a typical episode looks like: Someone posts a selfie. Other people react to the selfie. Someone writes a flirty message. People discuss the flirty message. Someone rates someone else poorly. Drama ensues, which mostly involves people typing angry messages in all caps. The producers try to inject tension by having contestants play ratings games and form alliances, but it's impossible to care about strategic gameplay when the stakes are essentially meaningless and the players are indistinguishable from each other. It's like watching chess played by people who don't understand the rules, except somehow even less interesting. The elimination ceremonies are particularly painful. People get voted out based on social media profiles, which means you're watching someone lose a game show because their Instagram aesthetic wasn't compelling enough. I've seen more emotional depth in a Taco Bell commercial. Why Does This Exist? I keep coming back to one question: Who asked for this? Who looked at the current state of social media—the anxiety, the performative behavior, the endless quest for validation from strangers—and thought, "You know what this needs? To be turned into a competition show." The timing couldn't be worse. We're in the middle of a mental health crisis largely attributed to social media addiction, and Netflix decided to create a show that gamifies all the worst aspects of online interaction. It's like making a drinking game during Prohibition, except somehow more tone-deaf. The International Versions Are Somehow Worse Netflix, in their infinite wisdom, decided this concept was so brilliant that they needed to export it globally. I made the mistake of checking out the UK and Brazilian versions, thinking maybe cultural differences would improve the format. They don't. Apparently, watching people stare at screens while crafting manipulative social media posts is universally boring, regardless of what language they're doing it in. The Real Crime The most offensive thing about "The Circle" isn't that it's bad—plenty of shows are bad. The real crime is that it's aggressively, relentlessly mediocre while pretending to be innovative. It takes the concept of human connection and reduces it to the digital equivalent of a participation trophy. This show represents everything wrong with modern entertainment. It's lazy, cynical, and designed for people who've forgotten that television can actually be good. It's the viewing equivalent of eating cotton candy for dinner—momentarily distracting but ultimately unsatisfying and probably bad for you. How Did We Get Here? The Death of Real Entertainment Sitting here after subjecting myself to "The Circle," I can't help but wonder: What the hell happened to us? How did we go from "The Sopranos" and "Breaking Bad" to watching people take selfies for prize money? When did we collectively decide that this garbage was acceptable entertainment? Remember when TV shows assumed their audiences had functioning brain cells? I'm talking about series that trusted viewers to follow complex storylines, remember character names, and engage with themes more sophisticated than "who's going to get the most Instagram likes this week." We used to have appointment television. Shows that entire families would plan their evenings around. Programs that sparked water cooler conversations and genuine cultural moments. Now we have an endless stream of content designed to be binged mindlessly while scrolling through our phones, because God forbid we actually pay attention to what we're watching. The streaming era promised us a golden age of television. Instead, it delivered an avalanche of mediocrity. Netflix alone pumps out more content in a month than networks used to produce in entire seasons, and 90% of it is unwatchable trash designed to pad out their catalog numbers. Quality control went out the window when quantity became the only metric that mattered. Looking back, reality television was the canary in the coal mine. It started innocently enough—"The Real World" actually tried to explore social issues and human dynamics. But somewhere along the way, producers realized they could manufacture drama more easily than documenting real life, and audiences were apparently fine with being fed pure artificial nonsense. The evolution of reality TV reads like a timeline of our cultural decline. We went from "Survivor," which at least required some skill and strategy, to "The Bachelor," which turned human relationships into a game show, to "Love Island," which treats people like sexual commodities, to "The Circle," which celebrates the complete absence of authentic human connection. Each new iteration strips away another layer of what makes us human. We've gamified everything—love, friendship, survival, even basic social interaction. And we call it entertainment. We're living in the attention economy now, where every piece of content is competing not just with other shows, but with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and whatever new digital distraction launched this week. So television has adapted by becoming more like social media—fast, shallow, and instantly gratifying. Shows aren't made to be good anymore; they're made to be "engaging." They're designed to generate social media buzz, create meme-worthy moments, and keep people talking online. The actual quality of the storytelling is secondary to its potential for virality. This is why we get shows like "The Circle"—it's not meant to be watched so much as it's meant to be discussed. It's content created specifically to feed the content cycle, a show about social media designed to generate social media content about itself. It's ouroboros television, eating its own tail while pretending to be innovative. The Audience Problem But here's the uncomfortable truth: this is also our fault. We did this to ourselves. We're the ones who kept watching as the quality declined. We're the ones who made "The Circle" popular enough to get multiple seasons. We're the ones who binge-watch garbage while simultaneously complaining about the lack of good television. We trained the algorithms by consuming mindless content. We rewarded lazy programming with our eyeballs and our subscription dollars. We created a market for artificial drama and manufactured emotion, and then acted surprised when that's what we got. The saddest part is how quickly we adapted to these diminished expectations. A show that would have been laughed off the air twenty years ago is now considered acceptable programming. We've normalized the abnormal and forgotten what good television actually looks like. The Way Forward I don't know how we fix this. The economic incentives are all wrong, the technology is working against quality, and audiences seem to have accepted their fate. But I refuse to believe this is permanent. Maybe we need to start voting with our wallets and our viewing habits. Maybe we need to demand better from the platforms we're paying for. Maybe we need to remember that just because something is popular doesn't mean it's good, and just because something is available doesn't mean we have to watch it. Or maybe I'm just an old critic yelling at clouds, watching the medium I love get slowly destroyed by market forces and algorithmic optimization. Maybe "The Circle" really is the future of entertainment, and I'm the dinosaur who doesn't understand that watching people scroll through fake social media feeds is peak human creativity. But I don't think so. I think we can do better. I think we deserve better. And I think if enough of us start demanding actual quality instead of settling for digital junk food, maybe—just maybe—we can save television from itself. Until then, I'll be over here, rewatching "The Wire" and pretending it's still 2008, when television had the audacity to assume its audience had brains worth engaging. My Final Verdict I've watched a lot of terrible television in my career. Shows that were poorly written, badly acted, or just fundamentally misconceived. But "The Circle" is the first show that made me actively angry at the people who greenlit it, the people who produced it, and yes, the people who watch it voluntarily. If you're looking for reality TV, watch literally anything else. "The Bachelor" at least has roses. "Survivor" has actual survival elements. Hell, "Jersey Shore" has more authentic human interaction than this digital nightmare. Netflix keeps renewing this show, which means people are actually watching it. And that might be the most depressing part of all. We've become so starved for connection that we're willing to accept this hollow simulation of human interaction as entertainment.

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The Circle - A TV Critic's Review And Descent Into Netflix Hell

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