At first, Terrace House: Boys and Girls in the City, a streaming reality series on Netflix, may seem like a cultural novelty to American viewers.

After all, the appeal of the “watch actual people try to live together” trope pioneered by The Real World is predicated on seeing people just like us thrust into cohabitation and then delighting as it goes off the rails.

The six inhabitants of Terrace House are not, upon first glance, just like us. They are unfailingly polite for starters, and the cultural standards for strangers getting acquainted seem to be codified in ways that makes American culture seem practically anarchic.

Terrace House is also able to plumb deeper, messier emotional depths.

You’d be forgiven at this point for dismissing Terrace House as cultural tourism, but you’d be missing what’s really special about the show. In a reality TV landscape cluttered by fame-hungry pseudo-human caricatures, Terrace House stands alone by simply letting actual humans be delightfully, heartbreakingly human.

It’s hard for even a casual fan of American reality TV to deny that, to a show, the “reality” feels painfully scripted. Participants are coached in how they react to certain situations, edits are made to keep conflict and drama at their absolute maximum.

It’s impossible for me to know how Terrace House is produced, but my sense is that ... it isn’t. Or rather, the producers seem to keep their interference to a minimum, and allow the “conflict” and “drama” to simply ... be.

Of course, this means the conflicts, such as they are, are typically of a much smaller scale. But the lack of obvious stakes make those conflicts infinitely more compelling and relatable.

Take, for example, a three-minute scene devoted to unwashed dishes. While American viewers might brace for that sort of issue to devolve into a drunken screaming match, the residents of Terrace House make their displeasure known and then — this is the really revolutionary part — resolve it like actual adult humans who care about those around them.

If that sounds boring, I assure you, it is infinitely more fascinating than watching artificially constructed brawls that parallel my own life experience about as much as the WWE.

The other revolutionary thing about Terrace House? People leave! That would seem anathema to the human simulacra we’ve been sold by American reality TV, all of whom seem to want nothing more than to stay on television forever and ever.

Terrace House: Boys and Girls in the City provides an lovely, subdued window into a culture completely different than my own.

When residents get what they want from appearing on Terrace House, they move on. It’s hard to watch people go, but as a result, we get to see human experiences the rest of reality TV has no room for. We see people get to patch things up before they move on, we get to see near-couples that never quite found each other tearfully talk about their mutual respect. It’s heart-wrenching and lovely and so devastatingly human.

By eschewing false, hyper-dramatic “storylines” Terrace House is also able to plumb deeper, messier emotional depths.

The best example of this is ... well, it’s called The Meat Incident. [slight spoilers for Season One in the next five paragraphs]

The Meat Incident boils down to this: Housemate Minori finds special meat given to her new boyfriend Uchi by one of the clients at his hair salon. She eats it with other housemates without him present. He is — inexplicably or understandably, depending on how closely you’re paying attention — devastated.

In other shows, The Meat Incident would be played for laughs. Terrace House definitely has its fun with the conflict, driven by the hysterical panelists that occasionally appear to comment on the action of the show.

That’s where other programs would likely drop the story, writing it off as a funny bump in the road to much juicier conflict. But if the creators of Terrace House had followed this well-worn path, think of what they would have missed.

They would have missed the sly way that housemate Natsumi demurred from eating the meat, perhaps sensing the conflict it would cause and wanting to absolve herself. They would miss how Minori had been chastised earlier by Uchi for her lack of ambition, and how one could see The Meat Incident as an act of rebellion.

Most crucially, they would have missed the resolution; Uchi crying in his room, hiding under a blanket to hide his vulnerability and extending a single, desperate hand to Minori. His breakdown, of course, wasn’t just about the meat, because that’s how humans are and what reality TV almost always misses. It’s never just about the meat.

Reality TV tries to pervert people into creatures of perfect ambition, whose every move is a calculated step towards getting what they’re after. Terrace House shows people as they are, big, dumb wads of conflicting, unexamined emotions just trying to get by.

Terrace House: Boys and Girls in the City provides an lovely, subdued window into people living in a culture completely different than my own. But since I lack that cultural familiarity, I have to conclude that the traits I recognize in the cast of the show, the moments of self-interest, impulsivity and compassion, speak to something deeper than culture, straight down to the core of who we are as people.

I started watching Terrace House to learn more about about a culture different than my own. What I got instead is a better appreciation of what it means to be human. Reality TV is a genre that, in its noblest form, is designed to do exactly that. Now, decades later, one show has achieved it.

Terrace House: Boys and Girls in the City is currently streaming on Netflix. The new season, Terrace House: Aloha State begins streaming in the U.S. on January 1, 2017.