Like anyone else wise enough to disengage from The Discourse, I waited a few weeks before watching Netflix’s social media-reality TV show experiment, The Circle. Though its description as Big Brother meets Catfish was enough to entice, my assumption was that only the worst, most boring people on the planet would volunteer to live in solitude while communicating with strangers via a web 1.0, fictional social media platform with the aim of making $100,000. It turns out I was mostly correct. Except, of course, for the saving grace that is Joey Sasso.
Sasso is a contestant on The Circle who believes he bares a striking resemblance to a young Robert De Niro. He is Italian-American, works as a bartender in his hometown of Rochester, New York, and is worryingly close with his mother. (She comes up multiple times in nearly every episode, despite not being physically present.) Sasso spends most of his time while in The Circle at the gym, removing hair from every inch of his ripped flesh, eating brown plates of unidentifiable meat, and engaging in a multi-step skin care routine despite the fact that no one actually gets to see each other. He ends each sentence with “bro,” because he is a bro—the most charismatic guido since The Jersey Shore introduced the world to Vinny Guadagnino a decade ago. I’ve never been attracted to a bro before (before The Circle, that was a point of pride) but now I am confident that I would die for Joey. I love him. It sucks.