Televised reality competitions occur on a spectrum. At one end of the spectrum is Love Island, which is gaudy, unoriginal and deliberately about as low stakes as you can get. At the other is The Circle, an out-and-out social experiment that primarily seeks to ask important questions about who we are and how technology alters our behaviour. There’s another big difference between these two shows, of course. People liked Love Island.

OK, that’s unfair. It might have been the case when the series began three weeks ago, when the simultaneous bombardment of rules and idiots meant that it was met with little more than a shrug. No doubt this caused at least one person at Channel 4 to rationalise The Circle as at least being better-performing than their last big reality competition, Eden, purely on the basis that it stayed on television for more than a single episode.

But then something odd happened; people started catching up online as the series wore on. They heard about The Circle from their one friend who was into it, then slowly went about bingeing all the episodes on All 4, the same way they would with a flashy drama. Suddenly its initially dull premise – strangers sit in flats, guessing at the true identity of their unseen neighbours – became something approximating must-see TV.

What’s great about The Circle’s success is that it always seemed slightly too cerebral to truly fly. From the outside, it looked like a parable about the importance of personal caution in the digital age, a sort of Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water for Snapchatters. These issue-based shows tend to make for interesting thinkpieces – which, incidentally, is the worst thing you can ever say about a terrible programme – but over time the humanity of the contestants won out.

Dan … equal parts horny and gullible. Photograph: Jonathan Hordle/Rex/Shutterstock

Everyone will have their favourite contestants – two big fan favourites were Scotty and Freddie, who embarked upon a truly life-affirming friendship during their time on the show – but I think the fulcrum of the entire series was Dan. Dan, being equal parts horny and gullible, essentially stood as an analogue for the typical internet user. He was fooled time and time again by the identity-masking tricks of his fellow contestants, but always managed to somehow push through on the strength of his boner alone. Until last night’s finale, Dan’s most awkward highlight was coming face-to-face with Mairead, a fiftysomething catfisher he had been sexting in the belief that she was 30 years younger than she was.

And then he met Alex, who had spent his time on the show posing as a woman named Kate. It was the most overt deception of the series. Dan, it’s easy to assume, fell in love with Kate during his time on The Circle. So, when he was confronted by a bloke standing in her place, his hurt was impossible to mask. Alex called Dan “mate”. Dan snapped back: “Don’t call me mate”, stung by his own gullibility for the millionth time. It was gripping.

Alex won, by the way. The other contestants, who all thought he was Kate, voted for him to win £50,000. The viewers, who knew he was Alex all along, voted for him to win an additional £25,000. This throws up some horrible lessons for viewers: you’ll never succeed by being yourself, it pays to obfuscate your true self, lying always pays – and, while it may not be shared by the rest of The Circle’s viewership, the impression I took from the finale was that we had been played just as much as Dan. It was a weird, uneasy ending to the series, and I think that’s entirely to The Circle’s credit.

The Circle will almost certainly be back. From small beginnings, this series managed to build up a decent head of steam, and there’s bound to be a Love Island-style year-on-year ratings growth when it returns next year. It wasn’t perfect by any means – it was still a little too brainy for true crossover status, a little too Channel 4 – but there’s one hell of an engine there. Make that chassis 10% sexier and I think we may have the next Big Brother.