Netflix's American version of the British reality TV series The Circle has picked a deserving winner in Joey Sasso. This surprisingly endearing mix of Big Brother and Catfish has captured the attention of many reality fans, and the winner turned out to be Joey, strangely enough.
Coming out of the first batch of episodes, claiming that Joey even had a decent shot to be the winner would seem insane. He was such a brash personality on camera - even when only viewing him through the direct messaging in The Circle. His flirtatiousness wasn't appealing to most, he proved to have little tact (somebody like Shubham couldn't be more different than him), and he had very limited strategy in the game. However, somewhere along the way, he started to grow on people, and it seems as though that happened at the perfect time.
That's the case with both the audience and the other contestants in The Circle. Joey was such a large personality - probably the loudest in the cast - that it can't be faked. Throughout the entire second week, there hadn't seemed to have been any suspicions at all of Joey being a catfish, and it turns out that there was no reason for there to be. He's too much of a fully realized personality for that to have been the case.
The week 2 episodes ended up with Joey and Shubham as the most recent influencers, with Joey rising from consistently in the middle of the group's averaged ratings to being the highest overall. There's always more to understand about Joey, and he's always willing to divulge that, so the more time the other people in the cast spent speaking to Joey, the better his ratings were. It took time for him to create a truly unlikely friendship with Shubham or have a legitimate heart-to-heart with Miranda.
It's not a coincidence that Shubham had a similar trajectory, given they were the two people most intent on fully being themselves in this game and not hiding anything. He was rated low in the first round, but his rise was far quicker and more noticeable. Shubham had been an influencer three times in a row. Due to that, when the final ratings to decide a winner rolled around and people considered a strategic approach in order to better their own odds of being rated the highest, Shubham became one of the main threats. Joey, on the other hand, was such a comic relief figure that, despite his success, he was difficult for others to take seriously as a threat. His odds of winning weren't met with as much friction. On top of that, he had genuine friends rooting for his success - and seemingly no enemies.
Plus, with the surplus of new people joining The Circle and several of them being similar to Joey's archetype, it was easier for Joey to form new connections than someone like Seaburn. While Seaburn had been doing well as his catfish, Rebecca, his catfish status made it more difficult to create genuine bonds. Joey certainly had competition - namely with Sammie - but he had the edge in this cast to get the highest rating when it mattered most, and he was more at the center of what the story of The Circle was meant to represent when all was said and done.