Have you watched Terrace House yet? The Japanese reality show has inspired several Twitter accounts and memes, and earned a devoted audience with its gentle rhythms and barely-there drama. Get in the know with ELLE.com: We're celebrating the Netflix favorite all this week.

Who is your favorite person on Terrace House? Wine-guzzling regular Seina? Hockey-playing favorite Tsubasa? Or “Aspiring Firefighter,” Arman. (LOL, Arman.)

OK, trick question: It’s You.

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You, or the Japanese actress born Yukiko Ehara, is one of the five commentators that sit on the Terrace House panel. But, to be honest, it’s painful to single her out as my favorite. The panel is practically a living organism, feeding off one another (in a good way!). There’s Reina Triendl (or “ Torichan ”), a model who often gives unruly roommates the benefit of the doubt; Yoshimi Tokui, an actor who takes soft jabs by imagining out the inner thoughts of the TH cast; Azusa Babazono, a character actress (and fashionista ) who balances Tokui’s male energy with thoughtful gags; a quickly rotating cast of young men who fill the role of “Naive Person” (Hiroomi Tosaka is currently in the seat); and the loudest of the crew, Ryota Yamasato, who makes fun of the roommates as much as he is made fun of by his fellow commentators.

You, meanwhile, runs the panel with her charming ability to switch from poised cultural commentary to chiming in on the slightly, er, cruder topics. One moment she’ll say something like: “Women are driven by emotion,” and next: “There could be a foursome; the four of them could peel a banana.” She represents the wisdom and balance of the commentators, leading them to discussions are are as interesting as they are often hilarious. But no one is perfect on their own, not even ringleader You. They create the perfect spectrum of opinion, while managing to have incredible chemistry.

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At first, while immediately charmed by the slow (but steady) drama of Terrace House, I didn’t really get why there needed to be a panel. They felt superfluous, making references to people and things I didn’t understand and cutting away from the meat ( ha !) of the show. It wasn’t until a hacky joke from Tokui had Babazono teasing: "What are you, a comedian from the Edo period?" that the spell was cast. Edo period comedians, I gathered, were kind of like the Catskill comedians of Japan. (And I was— mostly— right!) I realized I was actually learning about Japan a little like a AP Spanish student dropped in the midst of Madrid for a semester.

Now I’ve come to depend on the panel. Not just for jokes, but also for cultural context. Part of what we love about Terrace House ( other than the gratuitous crying ) is that it's a window into everyday Japanese life. (You could argue that it's a reality show, not reality, but I’ll take what I can get, unless you want to buy me a flight to Tokyo.) As an American watching the show, I have learned about customs like the age-old tradition from Kyoto and Kagoshima called nagashi somen , in which families grab at cold noodles with chopsticks as they rush down bamboo chutes; and the pre-spring ritual of Setsubun, which the roommates celebrated by eating long sushi rolls.

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I had to Google the noodle luge, but there are also plenty of un-Googleable cultural moments that the panel can clear up, through humor or deserved criticism, for Americans watching Terrace House. (The show is also available internationally on Netflix.) For starters: They talked in depth about the “Meat Incident” (which involved a few roommates taking another’s expensive meat and eating it without permission—high drama), or the time Yuki, at his own birthday party, chewed out his roommate Mizuki for not having a substantial enough goal in life. (She was 22.) Or something as simple as the odd way Yuudai held his hands to his face while crying:

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(No, they’re saying, Japanese people don’t cry like that.)

In the most recent chunk of episodes to hit Netflix, an odd moment turned transcendent thanks to the commentators' riffing. After two wholly awkward dates with show regular Seina, a much-less-experienced Shohei called a church, asking if he could bring a girl there and ask her to be his girlfriend. I laughed, but then checked myself: Maybe it’s just that they’re more polite than us? How thoughtful of him to call.

Cut to the panel:

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I screamed. My gut hadn't betrayed me—it was funny, and I wasn’t being disrespectful by laughing. Thank God they were there to let me in on the joke. It’s not so much permission to laugh, but by watching “with” you and reacting alongside, the gang amplifies the awkward, funny, and (their description, not mine) utterly Japanese moments.

The show once deemed “ boring and soothing ,” “ calming ”—a show where “ nothing happens ”—turns out to be not quite that. Sure, there’s less screaming and yelling than the traditional American reality show, but there’s certainly drama. And the panel helps with that, pulling out the moments of tension in the (often) elongated silences. “Their goal is not only to add humor, but also to provide a level of consistency to anchor the show,” writes The Ringer’s Nicole Bae . “For a series as staid as Terrace House, the hosts offer a dose of wit to keep the proceedings lively.”

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They give me nostalgia for a time, which feels long past, when we loved a cultural commentator. When E!’s The Soup—Greg Kinnear’s or first generation Joel McHale’s—and VH1’s I Love The '80s (and '70s, '90s, '00s, respectively) made rising comedians briefly household names. (Hal Sparks, what’s up?) These hosts commentated on the various clips that made up the shows' frenetic montage-esque structure. Remember Furbies? They were crazy, right? MTV’s Girl Code and Guy Code would follow that tradition, but by the late 2000s, we would transition into the panel-as-judges model with American Idol inspiring shows like The X Factor, The Voice, and America’s Got Talent.

And while today our beloved reality shows don’t have commentators by design, wouldn’t it be fun if they did? If The Walking Dead can get a full-length aftershow , can’t we prop up the bleakest moments of Teen Mom or Floribama Shore with an interlude of critical thinking and jokes? Just take a look at the span of podcasts dedicated to going hand-in-hand with your favorite shows. If there’s any time to take a page from the Terrace House playbook, it’s now.

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Lindsey Weber Lindsey Weber is a writer, editor, and co-host of the pop culture podcast, Who Weekly.

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