LONDON — “Message: ‘Hey girls, hey. I want to start this chat just to get to know all of you. Girls who stick together are pretty girls.’ Emoji heart. …”

Alana Duval, 25, from Brownsville, Tex., begins a group chat with three of her seven fellow contestants. They are sitting in separate apartments, never meet in person, and they bond and back-stab only through online profiles and a voice-activated social media platform.

It may not immediately strike you as a killer television format. But the drama had already begun.

“How old is Alana again?” wondered another contestant, Samantha Cimarelli. “Because she’s acting like she’s in high school.”

When “The Circle” debuted in Britain in 2018, cultural commentators were skeptical, to say the least. The Guardian predicted “fame-hungry nitwits sitting alone in their pants spewing small talk online,” and asked if the concept heralded “the coming of the apocalypse.”