Who knew ‘Big Brother' would become a comfort watch?

Washington Post

4 days ago

Admitting, at my advanced-ish age, to watching 'Big Brother' — the long-running, hermetically sealed CBS reality competition — can feel something like confessing to enjoying the horsey ride outside the grocery store.
The looks you get! The surprise that wilts into disappointment. The vague stare of concern that barely conceals a flicker of shaming. It's an expression that suggests something between 'You need to move on' and 'I need to move on.'
Twenty-seven seasons ago, in 2000, Julie Chen (now Julie Chen Moonves) first cracked open the door of the 'Big Brother' house (though that unwatchably drab premiere season was too directly modeled after the dry Dutch original). Reality TV has come a long way since, but for better or worse 'Big Brother' has stayed resolutely put.
It could be that its enduring motto — 'Expect the unexpected' — reveals itself most strikingly when you take the long view of 'Big Brother,' as the show completes a decades-long transition from dystopian vision of the near future to idyllic preserve of the recent past. What was once an edgy pop-cultural laboratory has mellowed into something more like Y2K cosplay.
There was something about the way the show emerged, seemingly in sync with the slow turn of the millennial odometer. 'Big Brother' arrived as an eager harbinger of countless sci-fi warnings about the perilous advance of a surveillance state — one that felt especially too close for comfort to the attorney who owned the rights to George Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four.' His 2000 lawsuit against the show led to an undisclosed settlement, as well as a disclaimer tucked into the show's credits clarifying its conceptual independence from Orwell's novel.
Back then, the idea of one's life and its minutiae being constantly recorded and broadcast was still novel enough a premise to batch 'Big Brother' in with reality TV's other experimental canaries. See also: Strangers living in a tricked-out New York City loft. Strangers stranded on a deserted island. Strangers flying to Hollywood to sing 'And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going' (often right before doing just that).
I was 11 seasons late to the game when I started watching 'Big Brother' in 2009, the show's trove of tropes and terms already deep and well-established: Contestants move into a house wired with 112 HD cameras and 113 microphones (including the ones they must wear), submitting their every word and move to public broadcast, with zero contact with the outside world for potentially upward of 80 days.
Well, almost. Once in a while, that seal is broken. In September of Season 2, producers notified houseguests about the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center. Contestant Frankie Grande — half brother of Ariana — was informed of his grandfather's death during Season 16. Houseguests competing in the online-only 2016 spin-off 'Big Brother: Over the Top' went viral for their reaction to Donald Trump's first electoral win. 'It's pretty safe to say you are the only six people in the country, maybe in the entire world, who do not know who won,' Chen said.
Each week, houseguests compete for Head of Household, a position entitling them to a fancy bedroom suite stocked with a basket of outside-world goodies and equipped with a dedicated system of closed-circuit cameras surveilling the house.
Since elite status means nothing without a societal tier defined by suffering, there are also Have-Nots, contestants designated by chance or choice to sleep on uncomfortable beds in a brightly lit room and subsist on a mealy nutritional paste known only as Slop.
The 'HOH' also nominates two — though, lately, three — fellow houseguests to sit on 'the Block' for a weekly eviction ceremony. Endangered houseguests can save themselves by winning the Golden Power of Veto, often attained through some form of carnival game on steroids. This season, an additional 'Block Buster' competition offers potential evictees one final chance at salvation, because audiences love a dangling fate.
These ever-shifting game dynamics, reliably (and capriciously) augmented by new rules, special powers, audience interventions and other highly expected 'unexpected' twists, ensure that 'Big Brother' gameplay guarantees a tangle of ever-tightening (and often snapping) interpersonal knots.
Really, the only loyalty that remains intact each season is that of the show's longtime viewers, who gobble up its mix of strained alliances, ritual humiliations and voyeuristic thrills. Viewers who pay extra for the live feeds (streaming 24/7 on Paramount+) enjoy an intoxicating omniscience over the houseguests, who plot their daily schemes as though from the porous privacy of a dollhouse, muttering bedtime soliloquies into lavalier mics.
Even viewers who take a decade-long hiatus from 'Big Brother' can stroll into the place and get their bearings immediately, thanks to its repeating gags and waves of now-archetypal contestants: There's the nerdy guy. The mean girl. The supermodel who is secretly a neurologist. The actually dense jock. The theater kid. An older man who misses his wife too much to make it past Week 2. The 'comp beast' (i.e. someone who wins all the comps). The 'floater' (i.e. someone who gets by unnoticed).
Recently, and only under duress loudly sustained over many seasons, the demographics of the 'Big Brother' house have diversified to be more reflective of the show's viewership, but 'Big Brother' has maintained its secret recipe of requisite personalities that yield the most volatile mix possible.
This cultivated predictability might seem directly at odds with the allure of the unflinching gaze that inspired the rise of reality TV in the first place — wasn't the whole point that we never knew what would happen next? (Even the show's thrice-weekly broadcast cadence — Sunday, Wednesday, Thursday — creates a steady, lulling rhythm.)
What was harder to see coming was the way the world would change around 'Big Brother,' and how the show would transition from futurist experiment to quaint little time capsule.
After all, the elements of 'Big Brother' that once seemed like feats of antisocial fortitude — say, cutting one's self off from the outside world to devote an entire summer to poolside lounging, in-person conversations and daily exercise — now read like the offerings of a thoughtfully appointed wellness retreat. Indeed, what was once the most challenging aspect of 'Big Brother' — being left to your own devices, sans any of your devices — is now what we call a digital detox.
Likewise, those facets of the show that once presented as oppressively intrusive indications of a creeping, dystopian future — say, having your entire life caught on camera and broadcast for millions to see — now qualify as the most mundane conditions of daily life. If anything, the houseguests seem to enjoy a more profound degree of privacy living lives of unharvested data.
In 2025, the allure of a dozen strangers lying to one another may be left with all the intrigue of a well-stocked ant farm, but if it's 'Big Brother,' I can't resist its dumb games, its petty dramas, its nostalgia for itself. I will continue watching until CBS cuts the cord. (Or my fellow proverbial houseguest wins the Power of Veto.)