Exploring the themes of Terrace House/Luke Sharp(University of Technology Sydney23-12-07)

Reflecting on the cancellation of the Japanese reality TV show Terrace House, due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper explores the recurring themes of the show across two of its seasons. While originally broadcast exclusively on Fuji Television as a domestic enterprise, it later became popular on an international scale as a co-production with Netflix to garner a widely diverse audience. Premised on the idea that three males and three females live in a shared house, many parallels have been made to similar global formats in the realm of reality TV genres (e.g. Big Brother, Love Island). However, the format of Terrace House is decidedly different in that a panel of commentators, entirely separate to those filmed living in the house, provide observations about the narratives at play. Considering Bakhtin’s (1984) approach to the ‘carnival’ and the ‘carnivalesque’, in this presentation I argue that the two seasons of Terrace House analysed rest on two recurring themes that are enacted through the panel commentators - these are the concept of the “Other” through representations of hāfu, and heteronormative performativity by ‘type’. Key words: globalisation, reality television, gender, race, ethnicity, popular culture