Techtite's What Went Wrong --- When Entertainment Goes Awry!

Yeah we know: Big Brother is still on the air...but for how long? It seems like every successive season knocks a prior bump out of the carpet, only to have two more bumps pop up in its wake. To be fair, this season did have many good points...but for everything good, there was also the bad.

For this special edition of this column (which more often covers cancelled TV shows), let's consider the best and worst ideas this series had, in our hopes for a more perfect (and quite frankly inevitable) Big Brother 7.

Good Idea: A New House! Any reality TV house with 14 people in it (for starters) needs more space. This meant a whole new house, with a huge Head of Household suite on the second floor. Cool.

Bad Idea: Nothing In The House! Yes, we know; the whole point is to isolate these people from the rest of the world. That means no newspapers, TV or...anything really. That's still no excuse to not fill this house with something...and by something we mean: anything! No, an exercise gym doesn't count; that simply tired them out. The real problem, though, is that even if these guys were given their own sports arena(!), it wouldn't have been used at all, because the house guests were too divided this season. Speaking of which...

Good Idea: Diverse House Guests. Sure, we don't want fist fights or anything, and then again, it's not like we want a house of characters from a children's show! This season still had the right idea --sort of-- when casting such diverse people. After all: Big Brother isn't Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.

Bad Idea: The "Secret Partner" Fiasco. In typical reality television, it takes powerful players to create an alliance of three people. In this season, all one needed is to ally with one person and just like that, they had an alliance of four. This made it easy as pie for house guests to create alliances of six (!), as early as week two. This made the entire season very dull. Next season, make sure that the house guests come in as the series was always intended: alone.

Good Idea: Surprises Each Week. A "Summer of Secrets" sounded cool at the beginning. For the first weeks it even worked like a charm. Secret safes! A secret bedroom! A secret food "pass"! However:

Bad Idea: Surprises...Each...Week! Aside from one last safe that contained little more than a "look behind the house" message (!), there were few surprises at all after week three. This made the summer of secret format a big tease.

Good Idea: Viewer Choice. It's always nice when a TV show offers viewer input. Splendid! Nifty! However....

Bad Idea: "America's Choice!" Thanks for telling us what "America" chose, CBS, but sadly, some fanatics took this overstated (and totally spurious) moniker too seriously. Felt such fanatics: "Horrors! How could people not care what 'America' chose?" How about: because "America," on the most part, didn't choose jack squat...? Do the math. On a good week, ten million people may have voted in a BB viewer poll. In the last US Presidential Election, over 121 million people voted. At best, eight percent of America voted in both polls. Let me be quite plain: Eight Percent Of America IS NOT "America's Choice"...! Yet various message boards got very annoying, very fast, often because of some overzealous crackpot insisting that "his" vote was "America's" vote and all who disagreed with him were "un-American" for saying so. Not hardly. In fact; if you really want to be specific about "America's" choice: a minimum 92% of America has chosen, and they couldn't care less what happens on your natty little TV show. Next season, simply call it a CBS Viewer Poll. Period.

Good Idea: Better Challenges. Sure some challenges were still mere quiz questions, due to limited time on live TV. Other challenges showed a lot of imagination, however. One challenge had two sets of gigantic combination locks with multi-digit numerical combinations. It may have boiled down to a numbers game, but it was still visually stunning. Likewise to a riotous parody of the classic game show Match Game, where three house guests dolled up like glitzy celebrities. Cool...!

Bad Idea: Weak Rules. Too many times a contestant would find a "loophole" in the game rules, and exploit it. I don't mind people winning because of dumb luck, but winning because you bent the rules to your whim is something else. This doesn't just apply to Jennifer, who received most of the flak about this when promising to do one thing then doing the opposite. Janelle won as HOH by answering a tie breaker question with the wrong answer, only to correct her error at the eleventh hour, without being penalized (say what you will if you're a Janelle fan, but to be quite plain: no other game show would've allowed this.) In a similar controversy: James won a veto challenge by not unhooking every cable on every playing piece; something that wasn't given in the rules, yet may have been the few seconds he needed to win that game. In following seasons, the rules must be clearer.

Good Idea: Dividing "Rewards." One of the bigger mistakes of prior seasons was having one "big" prize offered in the first week, and that's it. One season offered a car, while another offered a cash prize to the first food challenge winner, if they took the cash for a Peanut Putter and Jelly diet for a week. This season there were prizes galore; secret safes, big screen TVs, and even some birthday parties...!

Bad Idea: Random Rewards. Maybe I'm just sounding greedy, but the prizes seemed very random this season. Janelle won an expensive TV during an HOH challenge when by all accounts, she was one of the first to lose (!). Maggie won a Playstation Portable for her "birthday party," and didn't even know what it was(!!!). I don't think it does their advertisers any good when prizes are given so randomly. Here's a thought: how about a prize "wall" next year? House Guests would be asked to pick a sealed envelope from the wall and during Julie's interview upon eviction, they'd reveal what they won. If that sounds even more random: how about a prize for each winner of HOH? That's pretty fair.

Good Idea: "Revenge of the House Guests." A cute touch to the CBS web site for this show was a weekly blog they called "Revenge of the House Guests." Well known players from prior seasons offered their take on this season, week by week. Cute idea, but...

Bad Idea: Adding Kaysar To the Final "Revenge". This wasn't an "error" exactly; it just was one last sign of how partisan and anti-professional this season was. Yeah we know Kaysar was popular, but that's no reason to allow him to ask America to provide bread for his whine. Yes, Kaysar, you were outwitted, outmatched, and outplayed by the ladies in the house. So was the entire rest of the house, so deal with it dude. Allowing every evicted house guest the same chance to "vent" is one thing; implying that Kaysar alone was "wronged" somehow, is something else. Dude, you seem like a nice guy, but...you were hardly wronged. You lost. Game Over. Goodbye.

Article contents by "Techtite", copyright 2005-2006; all rights reserved. Title graphics, and pix not of reviewed product, are created by Techtite, copyright 1999-2005; all rights reserved. Screen captures and publicity photos are only for the purpose of this commentary, and by no means represent any affiliation with Techtite and the distributors of that product. For further "legalese" & disclaimers, click here...

What Went Wrong?

An Analysis Column, by Techtite

Big Brother 6:

What Went Wrong?

(A Special Edition of Techtite.com's WWWrong Column)