Recalling how “Terrace House” made its way into my life is as tricky as defining the show’s allure. There was a time, obviously, before the Japanese reality show was part of my consciousness, but I couldn’t tell you exactly when that time ended. Among fans of the series, this isn’t terribly unique. We were introduced to “Terrace House” by a friend, or we came across a screencap, or a clip, and then suddenly, inexplicably, we were involved. One day, I’d be lifting weights and thinking about Han-san and some perfect piece of advice he’d given another cast member, which the cast member had inevitably ignored. I’d blink myself awake at a gay bar, then doze off again to the thought of Seina’s picture-perfect wineglass twirls. I’d wait in line at the boba shop, daydreaming about Yusuke’s ukulele strumming, or Misaki’s fortitude. The house members danced dimly in the background of my life, and, little by little, the show worked one of its less-heralded pieces of magic—reaching across space and time and screens to quietly absorb everyone in its vicinity.

The premise of “Terrace House” is brazenly simple: three men and three women live unsupervised in an immaculately stocked house. The house is somewhere in Japan, except for when it isn’t. The cast members are Japanese, except for when they aren’t. In the latest season, “Terrace House: Tokyo 2019-2020,” the roommates include Hana Kimura, a wrestler with a penchant for creating wildly GIF-able moments; Ryo Tawatari, a pro basketball player who’s both confident and stupefyingly oblivious; Vivi Razdumina, an aspiring actress; Emika Mizokushi, a university student; a bumbling personal assistant named Johnkimverlu Tupas; and a standup comedian named Kai Kobayashi, whose material could be called “challenging” at best.

The show drew interest in this country in part because it so lacks the histrionics that are integral to other reality programs, like “Big Brother” or “The Real World,” that rely on a similar setup. Each house member stays until he or she simply decides to leave. No one is kicked out of the house or voted off the property. The house’s largely unbothered rhythms are broken by interjections from a panel of commentators, who watch footage from the house at another location, in real time. Like members of a hyper-smart group chat, the commentators, all of them Japanese celebrities—with the occasional guest spot—pick apart interactions and unspoken dynamics among the cast members, providing insight, predictions, or, sometimes, just bullshit (“How would I know how big his member is?”).

For viewers used to louder, faster programming, “Terrace House” ’s appeal might sound negligible. (“That’s all they do?” a new viewer asks in a satirical video about defensive “Terrace House” fans. “They just talk?”) The only way to truly get a sense of the thing is to watch it for hours on end, until the housemates’ daily interpersonal conflicts and resolutions superimpose themselves onto your own. More than a handful of my messages with friends have dissolved into debates about how our partners’ transgressions fared in relation to “the meat incident.” At a night-club get-together, I sat in a conversation where participants had not a single thing in common, until someone mentioned Tsubasa (“Captain Tsubasa!”), and the circle erupted in appreciation. We ended the evening confessing that we’d all, to varying degrees, found a means of pirating episodes that have yet to make their way to American Netflix.

In the States, the show’s fandom has crept from maintaining a relatively subdued fascination to entertaining a level of interest that can, at times, veer on fanatical (I am talking about myself; I am one of the fanatics). Fan accounts, from Terrace House Food Shots to No context Terrace House, find their wares in heavy circulation on Twitter, and the series’s Reddit account hosts a deeply active membership. Podcasts like “No Script At All” and “Tadaima” follow episodes from moment to moment, intersplicing the show’s built-in commentary with their own. There’s consensus among American critics that the show’s tranquility relative to its siblings in the genre is a balm, and it is; but that unhurriedness also places it among the most radical enterprises on television. In a media ecosystem where most successful programming hinges on competition, subterfuge, discourtesy, and obliqueness for obliqueness’s sake, it’s hard to imagine anything bolder.

In the midst of finishing a novel last year, I found something Masao Wada said in the “Opening New Doors” season, stuck in my head: chatting with a housemate about their respective lives, he asked, “Does love need a reason?” A friend who’s a fellow-fan sent me a screencap of the line, apropos of nothing, before two more folks, from entirely unrelated social circles, sent me the exact same one: each of us, in our own way, found it to be a simply perfect piece of dialogue. At the time, I was in the middle of writing a romance-ish novel, and that question sent me into something of a professional crisis, whose only remedy was rewatch after rewatch. Or, rather, the rewatching became the answer. Not too long afterward, Wada’s quote became my novel’s epigraph.

A few months before our current global hellscape manifested in full, I decided to rewatch the show again, in anticipation of the U.S. release of the latest batch of episodes, on April 7th. The lives of the cast members unfolded alongside mine, whether as the backdrop for a volley of e-mails or as accompaniment to a midnight snack. Fans of the show have praised the calming effect of repeat viewings. But as the coronavirus pandemic has been taking its toll, from one continent to another, the show’s amiability, the casual jaunts of its housemates, and its overarching emphasis on communion take on a peculiar new dimension. The cast’s casual runs to the bakery grew further and further out of reach. A midday foot-spa date seemed all but mythical. And scenes showing the roommates’ mere acts of joining friends for dinner, cooking alongside others, touching hands and brushing shoulders and laughing (and coughing, and sneezing!) seemed like footage from another world. It was a delight to watch each scene again, having once taken those interactions for granted. It was also just as much of a sorrow. In light of the coronavirus, the producers suspended further filming earlier this month.

Still, there are constructive parallels to be drawn between the world of “Terrace House” and the world we live in now. Characters flip through cookbooks, searching for the perfect recipe. They wash dishes. They lounge on pieces of furniture, remarking on the weather. They cook some more. They wash more dishes. They blog. Though the cast members get to venture outside more often than we do, their quiet domestic lives are similarly weighted with a sense of great, impending change. Upon arriving at the house each season, the new roommates immediately ask each other why they’ve chosen to participate in the show. Some move into the house thinking that a stint on “Terrace House” will jumpstart their careers, and others come looking for love, some swearing, convincingly, that a sojourn on “Terrace House” is their absolute last chance at it. The difference between their experiment and ours is, among other things, that they can choose when theirs ends. But they display, above all, an admirable willingness to confront the unknown. As Vivi, the aspiring actress, notes early on in the current season, while her housemate bemoans his romantic life, “We have to be proactive in finding love for ourselves. What else can we do?”