The Circle (British TV series)

Each apartment that the players live in is plastered with screens in every room in order for the players be able to hold conversations with other players as they go about their everyday lives. Each player starts out the game by creating a profile. This includes sharing their age, relationship status, a short bio, and one photo to use as their profile picture. Everyday, the players are allowed to share a status update, explaining their thoughts for the day. Sometimes, either through rewards or passing a certain milestone, the players are allowed to upload another photo to their profile.[10] Throughout the competition the Circle app remains the only way players can communicate with each other.[10]

During a typical episode, the Circle prompts participation in a minigame. Tim Harcourt of Studio Lambert says that "some games were really good for bonding them, some were really good for them learning about each other, some were good for testing who's a catfish, some could have been more divisive."[10]

Most episodes also included a rating exercise. Each player would rank others in The Circle, then an average score would determine the overall placements of each player. Depending on how high or low their average placement was, the player's ranking would determine whether they became an influencer. Typically the two players with the top rankings would be Influencers, with the advantage of determining the player being eliminated, or "blocked."[10][11]

The first season of the show was produced in London.

From the second season of The Circle, production was moved to a new apartment building in Salford, England - this also became the location of production for other versions of the show.[12] The apartment building is always prepared with twelve furnished and ready-to-use apartments for the players to live in.[13] The building also has an exercise room and a rooftop lounge, which are also outfitted with cameras and television screens.[14] One room in the building, called "the testimonial room," is the room players go to after they are blocked to create their goodbye video to the remaining players.[15] On the outside of the building is a large, lit up circle made of a roughly 82-foot (25-meter) diameter aluminum track with LED lights strung through and around the circle.[13]

Opposite the apartment building was the control room, which was previously a college campus that became disused.[13] At any time in the control room, there were between twenty and thirty producers and camera operators working, recording, and sending all the messages from The Circle.[13]