|
Summer Time in the US Means Time
to Revisit the Big Brother House
Note from Ryan "Hey guys,
sorry for not doing a July column... it was a rough month. Spent the first two
weeks fighting with my apartment complex over non working air conditioner.
(Temperatures were reaching 95F degrees in my apartment with 7 fans blowing and
the air conditioner not working) And then the last half of the month I've been
getting ready to move."
====
I'm not much of a television
watcher. In fact, I spend so little time watching television I told off the
salesperson at my cable company around Christmas time because they were offering
a two month free trial of their Digital Cable system. Obviously they do that in
hopes you try it, you like it and end up giving them nearly $80 a month for this
television package. Their salesperson seemed to think it was inconceivable that
I didn't want to try it out, and I flat out told him there's a reason why I'm
just a subscriber to their "lifeline" cable package which is the barest minimum
of channels (roughly 20 channels) and the reason is I don't watch much
television, in fact, I'm more likely to go two or three months without using any
of the channels I'm paying for already, so it seemed really stupid to add on 300
channels which I wasn't going to watch anyway.
However, in summer, there's one
indulgence I like to watch, and that's Big Brother. And I have the Australians
to blame for this indulgence. When I visited Australia in 2001 for the Mamma
Mia! premiere, Australia was in the midst of Big Brother fever, and there was no
way to escape the hysteria the country was going through. The show seemed to
ignite a passionate fever that was non existent the year before when Big Brother
premiered in the US. I never watched that first season of Big Brother in the US
as I was convinced it was yet another stupid reality show.
Australia's show seemed to have
really stuck a cord with Australia and I couldn't help but follow along no
matter how resistant I was trying to be when I first arrived. Australia's host,
Gretel Killeen knew how to work an audience and she gave the show flair. The
show also had some really awesome theme music that I will admit, I bought a CD
single of while I was there. And there was just this energy that was contagious
surrounding the show. I even continued to follow along with the results of that
first group of housemates in Australia when I returned home to the US.
So when Big Brother started
again in the US a month later, I was hoping to connect with a US version of the
show and it was a little bit tough to enjoy since they completely reconfigured
the format of the show due to it's rather uninspiring run the first year. Much
like the rest of the world for the first US Big Brother, it was the public at
large that voted people out of the house, and American's kept voting out the
interesting people just leaving the boring and non-trouble making folks. The
show was too nice and people were tuning out as it went on. So the American
producers ditched the whole America does the voting out procedure and made it so
the game runs internally, housemates nominate, and housemates evict. The concept
of a Head of Household was introduced where the guests compete for the title
which gives them immunity from being voted out s well a lockable private bedroom
for the week, but also has the task of nominating two players from which the
rest of the housemates choose who gets evicted and is ineligible to compete for
Head of Household the following week. Now the game is a bit more cutthroat as
the rats in the maze have to kill each other off to see who the last man
standing is.
Another thing that the US show
had that I felt were disadvantages was incredibly boring and lousy theme music.
It was this piano tinkering noise that didn't inspire thoughts of anything
beside boring elevator music. And let's talk about Julie Chen, the host. A woman
from CBS' news division who also happened to be dating the man in charge of the
network (now she's married to him), so obviously she didn't get the job because
she could handle an audience, in fact, the whole live audience that was there in
the first US show on eviction nights was also ditched. Julie Chen lacked the
charm that Australia's Gretel Killeen just exudes out of all although it did
become oddly fascinating how Julie Chen could contort her legs into seemingly
impossible and painful looking poses and ask the most asinine questions to
evicted houseguests only to not pay attention to their answers and ask them yet
another question that had been answered already. In the end I wasn't that
excited about the American version of Big Brother but I watched it to the end
and it ended up being alright, just not as compelling as the Aussie group and I
was only there a couple weeks to get completely hooked.
The show became much more
interesting the following year with Big Brother 3, as a new concept was
introduced called the Power of Veto. This would give the holder of the veto the
power to remove one of the nominees and require the head of household to
nominate someone else in their place. The veto has evolved over the years,
initially if you were a nominee and won the veto you couldn't save yourself, you
could save the other player, but people started throwing the competitions so
they wouldn't try for it, so it then became the "golden power of veto" which
allowed the winner to save themselves. And it also started out where everyone
competed for it, now it's just the nominees, the head of household, and 3 other
houseguests. Personally I think they could have a field day if they allowed the
veto holder to not only remove the nominee of their choice, but also have the
power to nominate who goes in that spot instead of the head of household.
Each season has added a few
twists here and there, and this year is no exception. This year as Big Brother
7, it's an all-star year. So many of the faces are familiar ones with the
exception of the "Chicken George" from Big Brother 1, and the 4 folks from
Season 6 as I was working 12 hour days last year for some special training at
work so I didn't have time to watch Big Brother 6. And they even changed the
theme music for this season. It's so much better than the old one, but still a
far cry from the energy and excitement the Aussie Big Brother show had in its
first season.
One of the nice twists for me
this year, is that I'm often not able to watch the show at it's broadcast times
due to my work schedule, and CBS has made it easy to keep up with the show with
the ability to watch the show online. And the shows are archived so even if you
don't live in the US, if you're interested in checking out the US version of Big
Brother and see how cutthroat it is with the self contained nominating and
eviction processes, point your web browser to...
<http://www.cbs.com/primetime/bigbrother7/>http://www.cbs.com/primetime/bigbrother7/
or to go directly to the show
archive go to
<http://www.cbs.com/innertube/player.php?cat=109976>http://www.cbs.com/innertube/player.php?cat=109976
And additionally a site I like
to catch up with that recaps the live feeds which I don't have time to enjoy
myself is here at
<http://mortystv.com/big_brother.shtml>http://mortystv.com/big_brother.shtml.
Ryan |
