‘Big Brother’: So awful, yet so addictive

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Story editors and producers for all reality shows have to edit hundreds of hours of footage into just a few episodes, but viewers never have the opportunity to see that footage. For $30, CBS provides the opportunity to watch feeds from inside the house via the Internet. The live feeds (which used to be free, and sometimes still are, once sleuths find the raw streams online) provide a relatively unfiltered look at everything that goes on with the cast during production, something that no other reality show does.

With raw data streaming all day, every day, fans, fanatics, and haters watch online and report upon nearly every action and reaction inside the house. They gather on message boards, particularly an exhaustive site known as Joker’s Updates, and transcribe the lives of strangers. Unless producers cut the feeds — which occurs when something particularly damning or secret happens — the streaming footage offers an unfiltered window into their world.

What makes it to the three episodes every week doesn’t always reflect what goes on inside the compound. Two years ago, the finalists on “Big Brother 4” made racist, homophobic comments about a fellow houseguest, and that footage never made it to the television show. But online watchers saw and reported about it, as they have about a number of events that get glossed over or ignored on TV, like the knife incident on "Big Brother 2."

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For its exceptional shallowness, “Big Brother” is quite complicated, and ironically, that’s what makes it watchable. Tracing the evolution of the cast’s relationships over a day, never mind three months, is extremely difficult, and illustrates the complexity of human relationships. Alliances shift, friendships change, romantic embers ignite and fade. With nothing to occupy the housemates' time except for each other (books, music, and most forms of entertainment are banned) they’re forced to construct their own drama.

Along the way, manipulative, cruel producers acting as the literal “Big Brother” do their best to play with the houseguests’ minds, sometimes locking them into bedrooms for hours at a time or punishing them by allowing them to eat only peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (the cast members literally have to earn their food every week). Producers have also introduced themes to ramp up the drama; last year, a half-brother and sister who didn’t know each other found themselves living in the house. The year before, five ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends were brought in to disrupt the house.

As a result, missing a few days makes it nearly impossible to keep up with the real in-house interaction. A few years ago, editors started inserting black-and-white flashbacks as reminders of past comments and actions, particularly ones that were inflammatory or hypocritical, and that’s helped the televised version maintain its story. But the events that occur even just overnight on the live feeds are at times difficult to keep up with, unless the watchers abandon their lives to focus on the lives of others.

For the sixth season, 14 houseguests will inhabit a brand-new, two-story house, the first change of venue since the series began. And CBS is promising a “summer of secrets” that will find every cast member in a secret, pre-assigned alliance with another houseguest. Even with a cast of dullards and a reprogrammed Julie Chen, undoubtedly, “Big Brother 6” will make news as it captures the attention of millions of viewers each week.

“Big Brother” is a blanket of human drama that covers viewers for three months, a sociological experiment that plays out on television and online. As the houseguests become more and more isolated from the outside world, they begin to turn inward, and it’s here that we see their true natures, and perhaps even our own.

Andy Dehnart is a writer and teacher who produces reality blurred, a daily summary of reality TV news.

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