NCDD’s Roshan Bliss Introduces A House Divided, a Reality Show Built Around Deliberation

Roshan Bliss, Director of Democracy Innovations at the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD), discusses his most ambitious project yet in a recent episode of the Derate The Hate podcast: A House Divided, a reality television concept that places three groups representing left, right, and center cultural outlooks in a house together for seven days to work through a real community conflict under professional facilitation. Bliss frames the project around what he calls many-to-many conflict, arguing that most of the country's deepest disagreements involve entire communities rather than two individuals, and require structured, multi-stakeholder deliberation rather than debate or shouting. He describes plans to pair the show with AI-powered deliberative technology that lets a large viewing audience weigh in continuously on the unfolding conflict, extending the reach of dialogue and deliberation practice well beyond people who would normally seek it out. The project, now in active development with a sizzle reel underway and funding conversations with social-impact incubators, reflects NCDD's broader push to bring democratic deliberation into cultural spaces the field has historically struggled to reach.

---

---

Roshan Bliss, Director of Democracy Innovations at the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD), appeared on the Derate The Hate podcast to discuss A House Divided, a reality television concept designed to bring structured deliberation to a mainstream audience. The show's premise places three participant groups, representing left, right, and center cultural outlooks rather than strict party affiliation, into a shared house for seven days, tasking them with developing a proposal to address a real, community-defining conflict. Professional facilitators guide the process, and Bliss describes the design as closer to a jury deliberation than a debate stage, with participants hearing from experts representing multiple perspectives before working toward a resolution together, all while a viewing audience votes and weighs in throughout the season.

Bliss traces the project's origins to his early career as a mediator, where he grew more interested in what he calls many-to-many conflict: large-scale, cultural-level disagreements that require a fundamentally different approach than one-on-one dispute resolution. He argues that skipping the step of defining a shared problem, rather than jumping straight to competing solutions, is where much public conversation breaks down, and that structured deliberation offers a way through that impasse. The show's central design principle is refusing to cast any participant as a villain, reflecting Bliss's view that seeing people across a divide as full, complicated humans, rather than caricatures, is what actually lowers cultural temperature. Combined with a planned AI-powered platform that would let hundreds of thousands of viewers contribute their own perspectives between episodes, the project aims to reimagine how the public square functions inside a media landscape saturated with competing content.

For NCDD's broader network, A House Divided represents a deliberate experiment in taking deliberative practice out of panels and public forums and placing it inside a format built for mass audience engagement. Bliss's framing, that dialogue and deliberation are already inherently dramatic and simply need a wider lens pointed at them, offers practitioners a model for expanding the field's reach beyond people already predisposed to seek out civil discourse. The project is actively moving from concept to reality, with a sizzle reel in production and conversations underway with social-impact funders and deliberative-technology partners.