Terrace House: Aloha State
The second Terrace House Mary and I watched, the sunny Hawaii season. A likeable cast, a house with a pool we both coveted, and a stretch of 2020 we got through an episode at a time.
After Opening New Doors, Mary and I were hooked, so we did the natural thing and went looking for more Terrace House to watch. Next up was Aloha State, the season set in a house on Oahu, in Hawaii.
Going from the snow of Karuizawa to a sunny house above the Pacific was a fun shift. This was the first time the show left Japan, and the whole flavor changed with it: surfers, musicians, models, sunshine, and a house with a pool that Mary and I both immediately decided we needed in our lives. A lot of Terrace House is just quiet real-estate envy, and this house more than earned it.
I do not have one big dramatic beat I cling to from this one, and honestly that is sort of the point. What I remember is that we liked just about everyone in the cast. It was a warm, easy, genuinely likeable group of people, and the relationships were the whole draw. Taishi, an actor, was the romantic engine of the season, working his way through a few connections before landing on Chikako. And the most famous person to come out of the house was Lauren Tsai, a quiet, serious young illustrator who went on to a real career as a model and an actress. But mostly I just remember enjoying their company.
This was deep pandemic time, and watching a sunny, low-stakes show about likeable people living by the ocean, an episode or two at a stretch, talking it over with a friend on the side, was exactly the kind of comfort the moment called for. Some shows you remember for one big scene. This one I remember as a feeling.
Image credits
The photo above is of the real person, not a still from the show, shared under a Creative Commons license from Wikimedia Commons:
- Lauren Tsai, by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0.
