Making It wants to be purely sunny, but the realities of being a competition show hold it back at the most crucial junctures. Offerman keeps deferring the fateful moment where he must announce who gets set home by pushing it off to either Poehler or the two judges, Etsy’s Dayna Isom Johnson and Barneys’ Simon Doonan. The hosts bring the kicked-off contestants back to their “barn” for a farewell drink each episode, but the pallor of disappointment hangs over the recently eliminated. It’s still a competition; no one, as the most beloved reality-TV adage of all puts it, is here to make friends.

And traces of this sourness can be found even in the sweetest shows. Drag Race hasn’t quite been ready to embrace progressive positivity; the All Stars season earlier this year was formulated for maximum interpersonal strife, which led presumptive winner BenDeLaCreme to dramatically take herself out of the running. And RuPaul has distanced himself from the ethos and language of queer activists by arguing that trans contestants shouldn’t have a place on his show—a markedly less cheerful narrative than the openness and professed love of another huge reality show based in queer culture, Queer Eye.

But Queer Eye, too, is subject to the ugly machinery of reality TV—the iron fist beneath its velvet glove. The show straddles a complicated line between making fun of its aesthetically challenged subjects and emphatically empowering them. It’s an addictive sort of doublespeak, made all the more confusing by the dedication each member of the (sigh) Fab Five has to its talking points.

On the one hand, their adherence to doctrine makes the episode where they encounter a recalcitrant Trump-supporting cop into a kind of painfully cathartic train wreck, a parable about returning intolerance with kindness. On the other, their assumption that they are the most fabulous and liberated men in the room fractures in problematic ways in Season 2, when it encounters Skyler, the trans man who prides himself on his style before he’s made over on the show. As heartfelt as the show means to be—genuinely or otherwise—there’s still a produced narrative arc that each episode must conform to.

And even zany Nailed It!—a baking competition charmingly centered on the ineptitude of its contestants—can’t escape the basic tragedy underpinning any American game show, where an industry drenched in cash pits peons against each other for a couple stacks of prize money. The nicest shows are still built upon mercenary foundations, whether the takeaway is cash, a remodeled kitchen, or the chance to build a national fan base.

Peaceful Terrace House is not immune to the profit incentive, either. The lack of concrete goals or clear competition means that its residents are outright gifted the use of a house and car, provided they opt to be constantly surveilled—not an uncommon compromise in this arena, but still a skin-crawling one. The show’s low-impact story suggests authenticity, but even here, there is some mystery.

As undoctored as it appears, there are some filming requirements that must require red tape—such as setting up a film crew at a restaurant, or getting permission to follow a resident to a job interview. Yet the show’s production process is a tightly guarded mystery; its carefully crafted illusion of reality must be preserved at all costs. And to a degree, its residents are still acting, even if, postmodernly, they are simply acting as themselves.

There is a type of cruelty that Terrace House notably doesn’t engage in, though. Reality television is often cloaked in a thick layer of stupidity—whether that’s the banal utterances of the Kardashian-Jenner-Wests, the deliberately obtuse cast of Duck Dynasty, or the overwhelming ethos of the current political moment, fueled so thoroughly by reality TV’s methodologies.

But Terrace House, free from the constraints of narrative arcs or established competition, must engage us simply by observing every piece of action inside the house—and what it does find, it mulls over with soft detail, drawing out shades of meaning in bitten-off phrases or abbreviated gestures that the residents don’t even seem conscious of themselves. Most reality television offers up drama; Terrace House allows the viewer to create the drama out of the mundane. Instead of making us numb to the screeching chaos of “reality,” the show sensitizes the viewer: it makes us care about the subtle gestures of being human, as experienced by several people halfway around the world.

In so many other reality shows—even the “nicest” ones—the characters are walking bits, delivering a pose or a punch line in an attempt to entertain, shock, or amuse. I don’t know if any of the participants on Terrace House have really made friends. But by drawing the audience in, the residents have, however distantly, found a way to befriend the viewer.