Terrace House: Boys & Girls in the City
Going back to the first Netflix Terrace House: the infamous Meat Incident, the studio commentators we loved, and the Tokyo season that started it all.
After the sunshine of Aloha State, Mary and I went all the way back to the beginning. Boys & Girls in the City, set in Tokyo, was the first Terrace House season Netflix ever put out, the one that introduced the show to the rest of the world, and plenty of fans will tell you it is the best one. We watched it knowing it was the origin point, which gave it a fun “so this is where it all came from” feeling.
The scene everyone remembers, and the one we could not believe, is the Meat Incident. One housemate, Uchi, had been given a portion of expensive premium wagyu beef by an important client, with specific instructions on how to cook it, and while he was out, the other housemates cooked it and ate it without asking. He was devastated. I mean genuinely, tearfully devastated, and the studio panel got to spend two entire episodes feasting on the spectacle of grown adults at war over beef. It is exactly the kind of small, human, completely overblown drama that makes the show what it is. For the record, Uchi ended up leaving the house as a couple with Minori, who had been right in the middle of the whole beef saga, so it worked out in the end.
What we loved most, watching this one, was the commentators. By the time we got back to the original season we had already spent a lot of hours with that studio panel, and seeing where their chemistry started made us appreciate them even more. Half of why I love Terrace House is the show, and the other half is a handful of funny people on a couch telling you what to think about it. This is the season that built that.
The one I think of first is Ryota Yamasato, the comedian who does most of the sharp, mean-but-not-too-mean reads on the cast. He’s the closest thing the panel has to a ringleader, and a lot of the lines Mary and I quoted back at each other were his.
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:
- Ryota Yamasato, by Japan’s Financial Services Agency (金融庁), CC BY 4.0.
