Introducing MEMORY WALL: A Weekly Big Brother Season Retrospective

Hello everyone and welcome to RHAP. We are here in the off-season of 2025 for some big brother content. I'm your host, turn Armstrong and with me...

to kick off our regular Big Brother off-season content for 2025. It's Rob Sester, and you know how you doing, Rob? Taren, so excited to be here looking back, kicking off 25 years of Big Brother, and what a way to celebrate the first season of Big Brother.

Yes, the season, the show as a whole, really. This is what we're here for. It's been 25 years. Big Brother initially aired in the year 2000 in the US. It's been 25 years of Big Brother. And so over the next 25 weeks leading up to Big Brother 27, because their numbering is off.

Uh, you will be covering, uh, I guess the next 26 weeks is really the real line. Yeah, pesky pesky season nine in the winter. Uh, we're going to be talking about each big brother season week after week going through the history of the show, uh, culminating in, uh, the start of big brother 27.

I love what you're doing here. One season a week to countdown all the time and fill the void of no big brother. There's no big brother Canada. This is it. Memory wall. Yes. You're carrying the torch of all big brother, Taryn. Truly. We're trying to remember. Remember it all here on the this is it's called.

the memory wall. That's what this off-season podcast is called. We're going to be going through each season and remembering memory walling our experiences. Luckily for me, I was at this point both alive and conscious enough to watch all of these seasons as they aired as well as having gone back and watched them over again as well.

Some dual perspective there. I'll have some guests on each week who will give me their perspective on the season and we'll have some fun with it. Additionally, what I want from this podcast is that we come out at the end of it with something a little fun. We're going to create our own little fan made 25th anniversary edition DVD covers for each season.

Yeah, a box set of fan-made DVD covers for each season, because they stopped making DVDs. Maybe we could call them posters. And each week we want to poll you guys on who you think the top three

on the DVD cover players of that season are. So we'll then create one for the following week and then we'll be able to showcase here is your DVD cover for this season. And we'll treat along the way. Were there even DVDs in Big Brother 1? Is this a VHS cover for Brother 1? I think we had DVDs in 2000. I think if you were really like cutting edge, you might have had a DVD in 2000.

I think, I think a DVD player was one of like a, one of the prizes in like season two or something. Yeah. I mean, it was a big deal. Oh, I got a DVD player. Really? It was out. I'm sure it was, but it was very like cutting edge. Yeah. And there were probably like movies out on DVD.

Yeah, yeah. Let's see. I think the first DVD player released in 1997 by Sony in the US at least. So yeah, just a few years before. But that's the general idea of this podcast, Rob, is that we're going to go through each season and really just celebrate this show that we all know and love.

Yeah, it's going to be a fun ride. I think it's a great way to do it. We've never done anything like this before on RHAP during the pandemic. I went through and rewatched 40 seasons of survivor. We did the in the order that the fans voted for them. This is going to be straight through and certainly not a rewatch, but more of a remembrance each week and an ability and a chance to talk about all these fun seasons as we celebrate 25 years of the show.

Yes. And really, you know, the show has been on for so long. And I think that it has so many new fans who have gone back or maybe haven't gone back. And as I sort of alluded to, there are some people who are fans of the show that they weren't alive when this season. Oh, I think there's a lot of people. I mean, that look on Twitter. You tell me these people are over 25 years old.

Yeah, so maybe this will be a little bit valuable for those people as well, but yeah, it's going to be fun. I'm excited. Yeah, and I think it's going to be, you know, not like all encompassing of every single thing that ever happened, but just like a fun look back each week and a great chance to, you know, instead of like turning Big Brother off for nine months out of the year, great way to sort of like keep the pilot light on for Big Brother for now until new Big Brother starts.

Yeah, well, there's no big brother Canada this year. And no celebrity, no reindeer games, no OTT. This is the first time in a long time where there's like an actual reindeer games I heard. It's gone. It's speaking DVD covers, right? You need a DVD cover for reindeer games. So really, I mean,

not only is there now a gap in the Big Brother space here as we wait for the season 27 in the summer, but I think it's also a reminder of how all of these other versions of Big Brother have come and gone along the way across the world, but also in Canada and the various spinoffs that the US has had. But the one that has always stayed strong and really is the longest lasting version of Big Brother in the world. Big Brother US.

and institution. And so we're gonna celebrate that over these next 26 weeks. So let's talk about, I think big brother, the concept a little bit. We will talk about season one in this podcast, which I know is not the most exciting season to talk about. Certainly not the most exciting season to watch, but definitely excited to go into season two next week.

But big brother, the show, the concept, I think is really, really interesting. I think that we take for granted just how weird and unique this show is. Even now, 25 years later, that there are live feeds. That's still such a strange concept that a televised program on a broadcast network, they have live

footage of their TV show that is broadcast on the internet. Nobody else does this, and they should, but nobody else does. Yeah. Now, Taren, did U.S. big brother invent the live feeds or were there other international versions of big brother that had live feeds for people to watch?

From the very inception of the show, live feeds were part of the idea for the show and then put into practice in the Netherlands when they aired the very, very first season of Big Brother in the Netherlands in 1999. The live feeds were part of it and they were very successful.

I know that the original creators of Big Brother initially had, I think, what a lot of Big Brother producers often do across the various versions, which is this sort of contentious relationship with the live feeds, at least at first for some of them, where they're like, oh, well, we don't want to spoil our own episodes. Again, there's such a weird concept. But the original Dutch creators, at least, quickly learned that like, oh, this isn't

I'm not like in I'm not combating the life. It's their adding to the show. And and they brought a lot of attention and success to the show and interest. So they quickly found that it was a huge ad. And then when they came to the US, the show itself season one.

Not very popular. I mean, it aired to a huge audience, especially because it was riding off of the wave of Survivor. But I think Survivor also undercut the nature of the show. In other countries, it was such a foreign concept, the idea of strangers being stuck in a single place, playing a kind of game, and being televised, being filmed.

survivor kind of beat it to the punch just a little bit in the US and was also a better show at the time and more game oriented. And so even though Big Brother One aired initially to, or premiered to a huge audience, that audience diminished pretty significantly over the course of season one. However, the live feeds were very popular throughout season one fact gained popularity over the course of the season. So really one of the saving graces of the show originally.

Yeah. AOL was a big partner of a big, the original big brother experiment. The live feeds were free. By the way, if you want to find out more about what Taryn and I are doing, you can search AOL keyword memory wall to find out more about this podcast and what we're doing each week.

AOL was, you know, ubiquitous at the time of people with dial up internet connections. Probably I think from just from a voyeuristic perspective. And I think that that was a lot of the marketing about big brother for quite some time about like the, the, the only place where you can, you know, watch people and maybe they're changing.

Who knows just here's cameras on people and you can do that. And it was really the only place and the first thing like it. And I do remember in the year 2000 having some horrible computer and a terrible internet connection and getting on and like seeing some live feeds. It was not

a great experience in terms of what I was seeing. It was a little bit more like a cartoon flip book, but it was something that was probably the most exciting thing about Big Brother One.

Yeah, and it's strange because I think for me, I was eight years old when the first season aired. I was watching Survivor, and then Big Brother came on, and I was like, oh, more of this. This is fun. And then I would be like, yeah, I got to watch Big Brother, but I'd usually fall asleep during the episodes.

But to me, as a kid, when they were talking about live feeds, it was just like, OK, yeah, sure, that's normal, I guess. You'd just broadcast a bunch of this stuff. And it wasn't until I checked them out later that I was like, oh, this is actually

new and interesting and nobody else really does this. But I have to imagine that for, you know, for somebody who was more of a person before Big Brother was airing, the very concept of live feeds, live broadcast, it was still pretty new at the time in general, let alone for like a TV show.

Right? Yeah, I don't think that there was a ton of streaming video. I mean, just to bring yourself back to that time, it's seven or eight years before YouTube would become a big destination for people online. So I don't think that there was a ton of live video that was out there for people to be watching. And so just the idea of a show that was available, I think, really blew people's minds. And the people that were really into it

you know, really started to build community around having there be the live feeds and the chat rooms.

Yeah, for sure. And that's another huge part of, I think, Big Brother is that it cultivates such an invested community in how people flock to the show to watch it on the live feeds or even just watch it in Big Brother One's case, six times a week, and have constant conversation. The internet was just a perfect place for it. It was built for the internet. And communities were built very quickly. And at those times,

like there wasn't really Twitter or I don't think maybe even Facebook but like there were lots of like very fragmented segments of community in various places that were developing and would eventually start to consolidate into their own various places but

Very interesting stuff. And Big Brother is such a pioneer in this space of not only live streaming, but reality, TV in general, and very, very influential over the course of the 25 years that it's been on the air. And all over the world, it's been very influential. I think that a lot of, for better or worse, a lot of the negative connotations with reality television

Some of those things, I think, spawned from Big Brother. Even his Big Brother kind of stayed its own thing. And I think is not one of the lesser evils of reality TV, especially because of the live feeds, in my opinion, but definitely helped inspire future shows. Yeah. When you say negative connotations, how do you mean that it set the first domino as they would play in the Big Brother one house?

Yeah, well, I mean, I think, you know, and genuinely, I think less so for Big Brother US, but around the world, Big Brother kind of operated on controversy. You know, the big thing, as you mentioned, was like, not just, oh, will you see someone changing, but like the question to ask when Big Brother was first developed was,

Wait, but you have cameras in the bathroom too? And it was just like this very weird thing. And it was very controversial. And a lot of people opposed the idea of the very concept of it.

And so that controversy then led to its success around the world. A lot of people were just like hearing about this thing that was very controversial. And they needed to tune in to find out what it was. And it was this fascinating new thing. And I think that part of the reason why Big Brother around the world, even though there are still many successful versions of it, many of them also failed, whereas Big Brother US has continued to live on, is because they operated

buy that controversy and the controversy can only last you so long, especially when other shows can come in and do it better. So like when keeping up with the Kardashians and, you know, honey boo boo and whatever else, right? Like all these other shows come in and they're like more concentrated versions of that sort of controversial like, ooh, you can't look away kind of thing come in. Big brother seems a little more tame. And so you start chasing this like, how can I get more controversial, more upsetting?

And that's I think sort of, you know, the darker legacy of Big Brother perhaps. I've been reading the book Cue the Sun by Emily Nussbaum, which is like a history of all reality TV. And I just finished the Big Brother chapter in that book where she talks about the origins of the US version of Big Brother. And the international versions of Big Brother, like what really captivated the international audience was.

specifically the idea of love triangles in the house. Like that's like, ooh, you know, what's going on of like, like, who will, who will he pay? Like that's sort of like what the vehicle to drive the show kind of was that you end up with potentially maybe nothing will happen, but maybe there will be a love triangle. And that's why there's really, there's no game in big brother one because it's all about just the potential drama that might unfold in the house.

Yeah, in the first season in the Netherlands, the first big thing that showed that the show would become a hit was that in the first couple of weeks, Bart and Sabine had sex, or at least they edited to me. Yeah, it seemed like they had sex. And that was like the big thing.

that everyone is then drawn to the show and they didn't look away afterward. And that was part of, I think, the success around the world as well. Big Brother 1 in the US didn't have that.

was largely its failure was attributed to its cast from the creators of the show. The cast is too boring. They're not giving us what we want. And I think what they wanted was more sex. But also the game itself, having the audience vote people out, didn't help either because the audience was voting out the most interesting people.

And I think that to allude to your earlier point of that you would think that, okay, launching Big Brother on the heels of like this is like the height of survivors like gaining popularity in the summer of 2000. Survivor is on the air about like five or six weeks at the point that Big Brother premieres in July of 2000. And you'd feel like just as you as a young person was like, okay, ooh, more of this.

Perhaps like in another world where Big Brother aired first, that there might have been a warmer reception to the novelty of the Big Brother house, but where Survivor was so much great human drama in terms of every episode and how it was put together and the storytelling there. Big Brother, the original season, is certainly not as tight and

not as exciting as what Survivor was bringing. And the novelty of Survivor was just so much more exciting. Yeah, and honestly, I think that's the best thing that could have happened to Big Brother because, again, as we saw around the world, those versions of Big Brother had a shelf life. But the version of Big Brother where it was like, wait a minute, Survivor has something to teach us.

let's try and take some of that. That has lasted 25 years. And I think Charlie Parsons was not fond of Big Brother US taking his concepts. And I believe he sued them for stealing his ideas, which they kind of did. I mean, Big Brother's a very different game, but the concept of them voting each other out was the thing that really helped solidify the show.

And that was the key part of his show, which, you know, what are you going to do? Yeah, the big brother won. It's just such an interesting thing to talk about because really nobody gets out alive except for Julie Chen.

Well, even Julie Chen was like, getting out alive was kind of the good thing forever. At the time, it was like, Julie Chen's career has been ruined by Big Brother. And she's now stuck with this show. And when she came back for season two, they were like, poor Julie.

You know, Mally, who was her like very short-lived co-host, yeah, she had a co-host briefly. He was, I think, let go. And he was like, thank God. I don't even think he made it through the season. No, he was out after a couple of weeks. Yeah. Yeah. Even Ryan Dunkleman got through the first season of American Idol before they gave it all to Seacrest.

So, yeah, I mean, it was definitely, it was a failing show. Like I said, it premiered to such a huge audience, but then by the end of the season, I think it had lost around half of the people that had tuned in originally, whereas Survivor had grown from the premiere to the finale.

Yeah. So it was a very bad direction, but the ratings are still very good overall. So the concept was good. The house was still there. There was a lot of reason to keep trying to retool it, but definitely was a failure and was seen as a sinking ship for a lot of the people involved. Well, I think that also there was potential in terms of big brother and the ratings were definitely up

from where the CBS reruns were a year before and, you know, they were going up against, you know, the other non-traditional programming like who wants to be a millionaire. So the best thing about Big Brother is that it's cheap.

and that it does all right up against some of these other things. And so if you could like pump out like six, seven episodes of a show for very little money, that there's some big advantages of being able to do that. And I think ultimately that's what gets it a second season in the fact that there was so much potential to be able to do something with this, if they could just tweak the format to get people a little bit more interested.

Yeah, and it's funny, because especially nowadays, you do think of Big Brother as a relatively cheap show to produce. But at the time, especially when it was being developed, it was one of the most expensive TV shows ever to produce. To get it off the ground, it was an incredibly ambitious project. And it cost CBS $20 million to get the rights to it alone.

So they had invested a lot into it. So they had a lot of reason to like, let's try again, there's clearly something here. But yeah, season one itself just wasn't delivering. They had. So if you've never watched season one, congratulations.

What do you think is the percentage of people? And I don't know if you can tweak your polls. I know that this is also going to be very interactive in terms of polling. Could you ask, did you ever watch Big Brother One?

And we can put that on the poll. So we will have here. Here's how this is going to work. When I put out a survey, just like the stock watch, you should be able to find it at Rob is website dot com slash memory wall. You can take the survey. If for some reason that's not working, I'll probably tweet it out as well. But.

You're what you're going to do for this week is you're going to vote for the three people from season two that should be on the DVD cover. I'll also put a question in there. Have you watched Big Brother One? Yeah, two completion. Yeah.

I think it's just like, have you watched it ever? Because I think that we're going to really lose people. Maybe it's two questions. Have you watched? Have you tried it? Have you finished it? Have you finished it? What do you think the number is going to be for percentage of people who are listening to these podcasts that have seen Big Brother 1? Listening to these podcasts, I would be surprised if it were more than 20%. Oh, see, I think it's higher. I would say like maybe half. Yeah.

I don't know. I think people have tried it. Yeah. People have tried it. I think I think more than half. People who have finished it, I think I'd be very surprised if it was more than 20%. Yeah, that would be very low. And that's because they're on it almost didn't finish it. That's the thing. It was it was over 70 episodes. It aired six nights a week. A relative breeze by modern big brothers say it hurts. Yeah. And it's it's

It looks very different than the show you know now, not just the format, but the way it was presented. Basically, there'd be like the one big show, which I believe aired after Survivor, but then most of the other episodes throughout the week were just these sort of like 30-minute clip shows, essentially, where you would just kind of like

Jump right in, there'd be some jingley transition music. You'd hear the occasional sort of like, you know, like set up or something. And then, and then it would just be like people just chatting. Like the boring parts of the live feeds were like having a meal and having a conversation. Like that, that was like in the episode. Yeah. The thing that they would focus on. Yeah.

Yeah, that's Big Brother. Yeah. Which, to be fair, is the way that a lot of other Big Brother variations work around the world is that, you know, when they don't have this game, they do this sort of like real-time sort of, you know, here's day six, you know, Bob gets out of bed and has some coffee.

You know, like that's like that's what the show is. Yeah. That's, you know, again, I could not have been more excited for big brother. And then when you would tune in like night after night, it's like, boy, I really wish something was happening. Yeah. Really wish that, you know, that they would make a little bit more progress on this jigsaw puzzle that they're working on. I also memorizing the atlas.

They had a psychologist on staff who would come on and do segments every week. Dr. Drew would be like, here's the psychology of what's happening with these people in this environment, which was like, again, part of the appeal. But again, I think that all of this was so undermined by the fact that Survivor had been on the air and was currently on the air because it was like, oh, what is the impact of sticking people in a house together, isolated in film?

Meanwhile, there's people starving on an island. Like, where's the psychologist for that? For those people, right? Like, it really, it just in comparison, just didn't line up.

Yeah, the live show had like various components where they really tried to present it, you know, because they have Julie Chen who ends up and she has talked about this famously of that she was not really given a choice. She was given the assignment of doing Big Brother. Her dream job is to be on 60 minutes. So she gets taken from the news division of CBS and then gets planted in this show really under the guise of like,

This is a social experiment. This is almost like an actual journalist. Like CBS News is doing this operation and so that they have Julie there who's bringing sort of like this legitimacy to it. And then they're talking about it like a newscast of like, okay, here's our psychological experts and we're bringing in like all sorts of like stats and data that we're getting from AOL where it's being presented like in a very professional manner.

Yeah, and I think worth noting as well that this season of the show was executive producer. It was run by Paul Romer, who was a creator in the Netherlands of the original version, who worked with John DeMalle. So this was like their way of conducting and producing the show. It wasn't until season two after the failure of season one that they brought in Arnold Shapiro, who was also a respected documentarian, but they were like,

Let's have fun with this and Paul Romer went back home to the Netherlands. But that's a huge part as well of why this feels so significantly different to the version we come to. Yeah, and it's just so disconnected from the rest of the Big Brother franchise because they have all these producers from the

Netherlands versions of Big Brother who are working about on this and have like very specific ways that they want it to be done. And in the book Cue the Sun, Emily Nussbaum tells the story about how Les Mundes, after watching the first episode of Big Brother, like turned to the producer and said, this was the worst hour of television I have ever been associated with, that the people at CBS did not like it.

No, no, they blamed, they blamed them all. And then them all blamed CBS. There's some finger point going on. But yeah, I mean, that was, we do have some pictures, some visual aids, if you want to look along on the video version of this. This is Julie Chen.

Julie Chen Moonves now, at the time just Julie Chen hosting season one. And here's our season one cast. Yeah, I don't think I've ever seen this picture before. I don't know where they found it. Yeah, okay. Yeah, so a cast of only 10 people tear into participate in the big social experiment, Big Brother.

Yeah, yeah. And we can quickly kind of run through the cast members here, apparently not in order of eviction, but perhaps alphabetical order by first name, perhaps. Let me see if I can jump to Will Mega, who is, yeah. Yeah, not alphabetical order. Just in random order. Why? William, William is perhaps at the end of the alphabetical and first name.

But yeah, Will Megha was the first person that America booted from the show. He was known for being a bit controversial, which genuinely what he said was that part of his strategy was to be entertaining and go in and provide entertainment for the audience. And then the audience was like, not that way. Sorry.

Yeah, look, Will Mega is somebody who comes in. I believe he was a Black Panther. And it's the year 2000. And this is live TV. And I just think that he was like ahead of his time in the world. And America was not ready to hear from such an opinionated guy on television. They might not be ready now.

He's probably very true.

There are a couple of other notable contestants here, though, if we want to just let me see here. There's Karen, who had some marital issues that she talked about. There's Josh and Jordan, who is the second person now. Here's Jamie, Jamie Kern. She's notable for a very specific reason, Rob. And she had her own moments in time on the show. But Jamie, if you don't know this fact already,

By a massive margin, you might think, okay, who is the most successful person to come out of Big Brother? You might think, well, Dan Giesling, he's got the Twitch channel, he's got a lot of followers. I know like Nicole Franzel seems to be doing well on social media. Other people have been on a lot of different TV shows, like maybe, hey, Josh has been on the challenge a bunch, like, who might be the most successful person? Frankie Grande, Frankie Grande perhaps, right? He's got millions of followers, the brother of Ariana Grande.

That's a great that's a great call. No, none of those people. In fact, probably all of those people combined don't even come close to Jamie Kern, who after her time and now completely unrelated to big brother. In fact, she probably wants nothing to do with being on her bio.

After her time on Big Brother created a company called It Cosmetics, which she sold to L'Oreal in 2016 for $1.2 billion.

million. Yeah. Good for her. Good for her. Good for Jamie. The thing I remember about Jamie in the house was that she had a secret or had like a crush on like a cameraman. That was like a storyline on the show. Do you remember this? I don't remember that one. I feel like that she was like, there was like, there was like a guy is like, oh, I think I have a crush on the, on the cameraman. I think I saw his reflection like in the, in the glass.

That sounds familiar, I will say. It sounds like a familiar concept to me. That is the thing, my own experience in Big Brother 1. Like I said, as I was a kid, I was the kind of kid who was like, no, no, you need to let me stay up to watch Big Brother. And then I would be so bored by it that I'd fall asleep or not care.

But then I'd still be like, no, no, you have to let me. You have to let me. So, you know, I was not exactly following the story of Big Brother 1 very closely when I was 8 years old in the way that I genuinely did when I was 9, when I watched Big Brother 2. But then even in like going back,

I've never, like, thoroughly rewatched Big Brother 1. Like, I've gone back, I've, like, thrown the episodes on at, like, 2x speed in the background. But I've never been, like, all right, let me sit down and study, like, what is the story of Big Brother 1? Like, I know it generally, but it is certainly one of my weaker seasons in terms of recollection, for sure.

Yeah, there's not even that many people that are like hipsters about it of like actually like big brother one is like is actually the best season of big brother that maybe that we'll hear from somebody now that we're saying, but it has no advocates that there are nobody out there. There are no big brother one stands.

Yeah. Even if you like this format for Big Brother, you don't like Big Brother 1. You just like Big Brother UK or like, you know, some other version. The people that made this show all disavow it. Yeah. It had terrible reviews as well. Like, yeah, it did not do well. Yeah. All right, who else? Who else do we have? Here's our winner, Eddie McGee. Yeah.

Eddie, I remember as he was kind of like, to my memory, seen as sort of one of the more honest people in the sense that like, he was able to sort of admit like, yeah, I want to win. I'm here for the money. I need the money. And other people were like, oh, you're not here to win. We're having to have an experience. And people kind of liked the genuine honesty from Eddie.

Yeah, Eddie, he famously lost his leg to childhood cancer, and then he was an athlete who played, went to college on a wheelchair basketball scholarship, but he wasn't necessarily like America's sweetheart, like that Eddie definitely had like an edge to him.

Yeah, there's quite the urge. Listen, controversy in Big Brother in the US still do go hand in hand, and Eddie does not escape that either. It definitely said some things that you don't want to say on TV, but hey, it didn't make the episodes most of the time.

You got that going for you. Yeah, Eddie came to my house to do a podcast once upon a time. Sometime, I don't know what year it was, I guess like 2016, 2017. And yeah, he was doing some kind of like children's books. And, you know, he is a president has a pretty healthy IMDB. Eddie McGee. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I remember he's, I think, you know, a few years ago, probably more at this point, you'd see like the screenshots of him as an actor, like in a movie or something. Yeah, fellow Long Islander, Eddie McGee. There you go. There's New York. Yes, Curtis, who also made a deep run here on Big Brother One. And here he is, Chicken George, the only person to return and play Big Brother proper.

We have all the middle names here. George Allen Boswell, yes. What a guy. Chicken George. What a guy. Chicken George was definitely like the biggest sort of like firecracker character on the season. There was all this controversy about how he was cheating because he had his wife trying to organize campaigns

Well, did he have his wife or did his wife under her own direction work to campaign against the other houseguests? Yes, she was campaigning against the other houseguests, which people felt was cheating at the time. Because again, this wasn't supposed to be, I mean, what, here's the thing. People talk about big brother in foreign, in other countries or big brother one, not a game, right? It's not a game.

But it is a game and it was designed to be a game like the entire point of having I guess we never even set this up, but like how big brother one worked is that The contestants themselves would all still vote to nominate So so basically they would they would vote to nominate and then the people who received the most amount of nomination votes

were then up for eviction to the audience. So two to three people generally would be an option for you to then call in and cast your vote against.

You know, what this meant is that you just needed to not be the person who got the most amount of audience votes to evict. And it also meant that there was still a game happening. But it was the same sort of thing with Survivor, where even though it was clearly designed to be a game, how the audience and even many of the players saw it at first was like, oh, we couldn't possibly.

play a game. This is real life. This is, you know, we're just trying to be good people. And so the idea that Chicken George's wife would be campaigning against other people to try to make sure they got the most amount of eviction votes was like, oh, how dare she? Chicken George should be expelled. He's cheating.

Yeah. And this got into the house with by way of banner planes and people. And I was watching YouTube clips where one of the evicted house gets Brittany told Josh Sousa in the house what was going on. And this was in the show. Yeah, they had her talk to talk too much. She was gone.

And that wasn't it either for Chicken George. He also helped lead the revolution against the producer. Yeah, this is very interesting. And I kind of had forgotten the details of it, but Chicken George ended up having a, he was gonna make a big announcement. And then the big announcement that he ends up announcing was that he has gotten a sign

And the sign was that they all need to leave the house. And if they all leave together, that's actually the game. He figured it out. They would all win if they all left simultaneously.

Yep, which, which reminds me that something similar happened in Borneo, right? Where they tried to orchestrate some kind of coup and all vote for Jeff. That was the thing, right? Well, yeah, I think that's a couple of different things that are like, I think the Toggy tribe like horsing around voted for Jeff. And then there's another moment where the, and Jeff, I think has even told a version of this story where one of the rewards was a, a but light.

and it's like you'll win one Bud Light. And the cast is like all's like, we're not playing for that. We're not doing that. We need to like up the rewards if you want us to actually play.

Yeah. But yeah, this is something that, especially in the early days of reality TV, your contestants might revolt against you. Yeah. And they were really thinking about it. All of the different players were seriously in their own ways, contemplating like, what if he's right? What if George is telling the truth?

Yeah, it's honestly, you know, I'm watching Squid Game season two. Wait, I feel like I've seen this before. Yeah. But yeah, that was that was in what was particularly interesting about that too. They don't obviously end up all leaving. But there is a point later in the season where production then is kind of like, Hey, remember when you guys wanted to leave?

What if one of you decided, what if one of you left? What if we pay one of you to leave? Because we've got someone more interesting that we wanna put in the house. Yeah, so they had another woman contestant that they were going to bring in and she was like presented as, oh, she's a party girl. She loves to- She's gonna stick her mind. She goes out and she is like, it's like, hold on.

you voted out will mega and jordan like what makes you think this is what america wants but you know the people that were voting in the people that were watching we're not necessarily the same uh... group of people and they thought okay well if we could bring this woman in ratings are gonna go uh... berserko and so they tried to bribe them like an all of all you have to do this like very mister beast uh... these games of like hey one of you just take

Was it $100,000 or what? I think it was less than that. Less than that. Okay. But so we've got a suitcase full of cash. You're not all going to win. Just one of you take the cash and we'll bring this other woman into the house.

I think it was $20,000 initially, and then they upped the offer to $50,000, and nobody took it. But the thing was, too, that was maybe interesting about this, and they'd never do this now, or at least

hopefully they never would is that this person was obviously not sequestered throughout the entire season. This is pretty late in the season. It was day 64, I believe. And she had been watching the season. So she was, that's what the whole thing I was going to speak my mind. I have opinions about these people that I want to go in there and tell them about.

Yeah, that was gonna be exciting. I remember watching this episode. I remember sort of like being like, a little checked out in Big Brother One, and I remember like, oh, and for some reason, I could be wrong about this, but I feel like I just didn't remember. This was like a Friday night this episode was gonna be on. And me and my friend Floyd, we were locked in, and we were rooting hard for the new woman to get into the house, and then walked away again, like, oh, this show. They never do anything good.

Never, never do anything good. Well, to my, that, those are all the most memorable things about season one to me. I don't know if you had any other highlights. Yeah, we flipped through some of the other go back to the beginning of the scroll and just, so Cassandra Walden, R.I.P. Cassandra, who was from the United Nations, very classy lady in the Big Brother house.

Yeah. I mean, great. I'm not sure what she was doing here. Getting mixed up with a show like this. Brittany ends up being famous for her pink hair and her nose piercing. She was the 25 year old virgin. There was the flirt man with Josh. Will they won't they? They won't. That was the problem. That was the problem. Yeah.

But yeah, she was sort of like kind of like a spunky, you know, character. Yeah. Big personality, Brittany.

Yeah. You know, she was the kind of like they would go to her to be like, Oh, is she going to like talk about sex? Like is she going to talk? S E X? Oh no. Yeah. Okay. Um, you want to talk about it? We go back down. Okay. Yeah. Curtis is fine. Eddie. We got Eddie Jordan.

Jordan, the exotic dancer, who again, another thing of like, ooh, okay, here we go, big brother 2000. Okay, we have cast an exotic dancer, but the big brother voters were a little puritanical in terms of we do not like this lady who is an exotic dancer. We do not like her exotic dancing to exotic. Yeah.

And that is the thing too. And this is, you know, I always talk about Big Brother as sort of a reflection of society, but like, you know, Jordan being voted out, not super unique to the show as a whole. I talked about Bart and Sabine in the Netherlands after they like had sex in the episodes shortly after. She was then voted out of the show.

And I don't know if it was entirely on the audience. I think that part of the idea was that they, to my memory, I think they nominated both Bart and Sabine to make sure that one of them left. But either way, she was then quickly voted out. Bart went on to win that season. So definitely I think an element in general of like, we want to see, sure, X, we want to see this sort of kind of butt.

We also have to punish women for it. Well, yeah. And the show tries to like paint a flirtation between her and Josh and, you know, like, oh wait, does Josh like Brittany? Ultimately, Jordan gets voted out. Who ends up being the final three? The three guys from the house. And so like the big brother audience and the voters, you know, they liked

They liked their nice young guys and did not like Jordan, even though David Letterman tried to save her and tried to get people to phone in and save the stripper. And it did not work out. Did not. Did not for Jordan. First big brother Jordan.

All right, anyone else? And the first big brother Parker, yeah. Then, who else? Well, Josh Sousa, I knew well because Josh Sousa played a big role in my life in that when I was very down and very out, a back after survivor All-Stars in the summer of 2004, I got an email one day from Josh Sousa.

Josh Sousa was working in Los Angeles that he had kind of like a business of like trying to be like an agent for reality stars and he reached out to me and he was working with these producers and like, hey, we're starting something up called

the fishbowl and we want to talk to you. And so I ended up like, you know, writing back to Josh and then I ended up flying out to LA shortly thereafter and meeting with, you know, a bunch of producers who I then ended up like moving out to allies to share an office with Josh Sousa once upon a time.

Nice, you know, nice guy. Loved reality TV and was, you know, like really presented as the guy that, oh, maybe he's going to get the ladies in the big brother house. Now, ultimately his second place runner up. He got them second. And, you know, in another world where Eddie isn't in the house, like Josh may well be the winner. I have no idea where Josh Sousa is in the world now.

I don't know, maybe we can find him. But he was a big part of, or a part of my eventual journey into Los Angeles, starting to interview reality stars. And so he at least played a small part in writing an email to me that somebody else asked him to send out for me to set up a meeting with me.

Listen, Rob, I'm so glad we had you on for that. I didn't realize. What a trip down memory wall. What trip down memory wall? Wait, would you have Chiquita the pug? The 11th house guest? I don't know. I don't think we have that on the sideshow. Yeah. Chiquita that they got, they got, I think the only time in Big Brother history, they got a new dog.

They got a dog to be in the house. Well, that was a big part of like, part of Big Brother One was sort of like back to basics. And a big part, like without a game, did they just give them something to do? And so that's where like the chickens came in and the pets, and they do introduce pets occasionally in future seasons. We have, was it Ophelia the pig in season two? Yep. And then I think in seasons.

16, they had a little dog that came in for a little while for like a week or so, something like that. But oh, here we go. We have, let me see if I can. Yeah, there he is. Chiquita the duck. And then he fell in the pool and Josh Sousa had to jump in and save him.

Listen, it's great for your ratings. They would have tasks that would be so long. They would have to, their tasks to get stuff. They had to do a task, I remember, where they had to drive across the country.

and then remember what road to get from the main to San Diego. And you had to memorize. That's my journey. Yeah, something like that. I don't remember the exact decision. And each of them had to remember a specific, the roads that you have to take to do that trip.

Like take the 10 to the 61 and then go south on the 92, then go west on the, you know, 48. And that was like a thing. They had like a giant atlas that they would study. And I was watching clips where they're like laying out 11,000 dominoes.

This is the peak of where I let it deliver. Maybe not the peak. I guess survivor was the peak. This was the little sister peak, a little brother peak, I should say. Little brother peak. And this is the kind of stuff that they would do.

Yeah. And, you know, I think hopefully if you haven't watched the season, you now understand, I think both the appeal initially and also why it didn't work. There were 70 episodes of this. Yeah. Like who wants to watch people recall their path from Maine to San Diego, apart from, I guess, me.

Yeah. That's the story of your life. Right. Yeah. That's what they were plotting. They were like premonitions of like their one day they will be a taren Armstrong and he will chronicle all of our journeys. Listen, big brother is such a big part of my life. Maybe they put the idea in my head as a child and then without even knowing I took their path. You fought without was the first domino. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, there's, I mean, the cast as a whole, I think, also figured out that, all right, they didn't like Wilmega. They didn't like Jordan. So you could blame the cast for being boring, but the cast also was like, oh, you didn't like the spicy contestants.

You didn't like the people that were, you know, making some waves in this house. So all right. Let's just like play it close to the vest. Let's, let's not be super exciting.

Yeah, and I think that's what's really telling is that, you know, the producers on both sides blamed the casting. They just blamed each other for like who was responsible for the casting, but like the official line was, sorry guys, the cast sucked. Nothing we can do, but look around the world, it does well around the world, but the cast sucked, they failed us. But when it came to season two, they said, oh, we changed our casting process where we have much different casting in season two, but like,

They also changed the structure of the show and the game. And I think that's really the difference, because casting is great. And I think that casting is important. But ultimately, I think that what it comes down to is the structure of the environment in which you put them in. That is what's going to make the difference. That is what's going to make your show.

and you'd have the most interesting people in the world, but if they're doing something really boring, it's not gonna be interesting. You'd have really boring people, but if you put them in really interesting situations, I think it can still be interesting. And I think that's what they discovered when they changed their format.

And for CBS, you know, it's so hard for them in that they have like the one on the one hand, like they have Survivor, which is like the ultimate TV juggernaut, like this phenomenon of that, you know, every week is gaining popularity, 20 million, 25 million, 30 million, 35 million, people are tuning in week after week, wanting to see what's going on with the phenomenon. And then this big brother.

which is like a little bit of like the, you know, unwanted child in this mix of like, why can't you be more like your big brother? You know, why can't you be more like survivor? You discussed us like you had so much potential. And so not to, you know,

do too much of a preview to your Big Brother 2 podcast next week. But I do feel like that they are going to try to, okay, no, it's not us. We can fix this.

Yeah, exactly. And what I think is really interesting about that, too, is that Survivor was such a phenomenon and still is the more watched show between Survivor and Big Brother in the US. But never came close to finding the level of success that Big Brother did around the world.

which I think is really interesting, right? I do think that there is some element to the format that is the competitive side of the competitive reality show that is so distinctly American and just doesn't

translate as well around the world. So, you know, Survivor just crushes here, and Big Brother flounders, but Big Brother ultimately sort of like the more successful franchise using the format that didn't work here. But then the most successful version of Big Brother, at least the longest lasting, I wouldn't necessarily say the most successful, the longest lasting version of the show is the one that is here. So there's a little bit of like give and take there that I find really interesting.

Yeah, Big Brother, you know, ends up being a summer show here. I don't know if that has anything to do with it where, you know, it premieres in July of 2000 and then really with the exception of Big Brother 9 and some of these like COVID and strike years.

really ends up like existing for the most part. For the summer months, you know, July, August into September, it's sort of like designed to be sort of like in lieu of reruns of CBS. CBS has this great thing that can plug and spackle all the different holes in its lineup, whereas Survivor gets more of the coveted

fall spots, the spring months, which are traditionally the big event TV times of the year. It gets presented in a little bit of better time slots that it's not on bouncing around sometimes Saturday nights and all sorts of other places on the schedule like Big Brother ends up getting.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, nowadays, especially, I think, you know, Big Brother is really used to just sort of plug holes and fill in gaps. And they've never really found any alternative to summer program. Because basically, Big Brother came in and just fixed summer program. Like it just did better than anything they could put in the summer before. And then for the last

25 years has just been their summer programming, just consistently, which is wild. It's just like that's just been wild. It's wild. It's such a success story for

for the network and as a television show, so many other reality shows and scripted whatever they've come and gone. Big Brother has just stood the test of time and has really seen as much as we complain about it. It has really just continued on and really maintained it's certainly the ratings have gone down over time. All ratings have gone down over time.

But really, especially with online presence and the community that's built around it and engagement and watch time, it still does very well, which is wild. And I think another thing that we haven't really spoken to, I'm talking about the live feeds and the amount of episodes they're able to do to plug all these holes in the summertime schedule.

In Emily Nussbaum's book, she talks about how while Survivor was filmed sort of like a traditional television show where they go, they film the season, they spend all this time editing it, you know, compared to Big Brother, Survivor is like the Stone Age compared to what Big Brother has set up in being able to turn around these episodes incredibly fast. I mean, there's nothing else like it

on television or reality television, where they're able to, you know, have things that are happening in the house on your TV the next day.

I mean, yeah, I mean, I think nowadays that is like a format that they have, especially in other countries like the UK. There's a term for it that I don't remember, but it's this thing they do. Love Island was kind of like one of the more popular versions of it where it was like a daily schedule and they'd show you what aired the previous day. But that was heavily, in fact, I would say almost directly ripped from Big Brother, that format.

And that's still the format that works for Big Brother often in other countries. In a very interesting way, in terms of how the different countries present their shows, Big Brother 1, as I said, in the episodes is presented as sort of a

here's what happened this day. They had dinner. Oh, they had a conversation about Karen's husband. And that was the episode. And it's presented like it was not very edited. Like it was just sort of, you're just watching it like it was feed. And then you start getting to season two and then flash forward 20 years. And it's like,

So I went into the backyard and I saw a big giant machine and I was dressed like a cat. And it's like, you know, it's very, very different. But in the UK and other countries where Big Brother is still on the air and it's not the US version.

That original Big Brother US, and it wasn't original to Big Brother US, but that original format still exists where like the episodes are still presented as though they're kind of live. As you know, you get that feel of the live feeds, even when some of those versions don't have live feeds.

And I think that's because the live aspect of Big Brother is so crucial to its success, especially nowadays, when there are so many other kinds of shows doing all kinds of interesting things. Like, Big Brother, the concept is very tame, but the live thing is the thing that no other show really is able to do as well.

And so, you know, Big Brother in the US gets to sort of give that away through the feeds, and then the episodes are very tightly edited and stuff, and people don't love that all the time, but in other countries, especially if they don't have live feeds, they have more live feeling aspects to their episodes and feel more natural, and the diary rooms often feel more natural as well, because there's a distinct difference in usually the tense, even. Like in Big Brother, you're talking about like, you're talking as though you're doing the thing right now,

like, I walk into the backyard, but you're talking about it after the fact, right? So there's a little bit of like cognitive dissonance there. And in other versions, you'd probably go into the diary and say, so I walked into the backyard, like, right? Like, when I was in the backyard, I was having this conversation and it feels like it doesn't feel as sort of like staged. But of course, it has its own sort of

versions and and and evolutions for how it becomes more and more commoditized and such. But yeah, lots lots of interesting stuff about Big Brother. I find it endlessly fascinating. Yeah. In the year 2000, the franchise was born, but it was just the beginning of a real evolution of this thing. So next week, we'll we'll really like

Dive in a little more. We'll talk about season two. Talk about some of the breakout characters of season two. We'll release the survey so you can go to robswebsite.com slash memory wall to vote for who are the three people that should be on the poster for that season.

You got some options, I will say. You got some options. Choose correctly, right? And really, that's when the game changes. Strategy comes into focus and the game really starts to kick in and evolve, which is very interesting and I'm excited to talk about it. Are we doing a DVD cover for season one?

I don't think we planned to, but we can put out a survey for that one too. We can maybe throw out a sequence survey.

Listen, this is an audience-made poster, so I can't have it. All right, so then, can we give recommendations? Or are we gonna put our thumb on this? Sure, yeah, we can endorse our own first. So I think that Eddie needs to be there with a winner. I don't know if every season's winner needs to be on the DVD cover. Well, that's gonna be the... George should be there because I think he's sort of like the iconic person out of there. Who do you think should be the third?

It's a good question. I mean, I could see a case being made for like Will Megha. I feel like Will Megha is the same that you might hear from the season more so than most others. Well, I think that Will Megha was just such a unique character for the time and was so outspoken about how he was presented, like even in the real time.

That's an interesting case. I think you could make a case for Brittany. I feel like her pink hair I think could really pop out. I think Josh could be there on the DVD cover. So I think the third one would be interesting. Could you pull for both on the on the survey? Yeah, we'll put both in there. Yeah. I don't think it'll be Karen. Probably not Karen. I used to why Karen would just like chain smoke in the backyard.

I don't know that just anybody have stats on over under did Karen smoke? 4,000 cigarettes on Big Brother or less than evil dick. Well, we'll find out. They smoke a lot on Big Brother. Oh, yeah, it was a whole it was a huge thing. It was part of strategy was like who were the smokers who were the smokers and they just be outside like be like really like prison vibes.

Yeah. So yeah, and Karen with a big time smoker. You'll talk about Kent next week. Oh, they ran out of toilet paper. Also, big brother.

I remind you, because I have no time in many ways, Rob. Yeah, they ran out of toilet paper, and they were like, hey, big brother, can we have more toilet paper? And they're like, well, you have to give us money. You have to pay money to big brother for things. And then they're like, uh, we'll, we'll just, we'll keep our, keep the money and we'll, we'll see if we can get by with no toilet paper. Mm hmm. I mean, on Survivor, you do it, but they didn't, listen, they didn't have a bidet at the time. They weren't, you know, shooting water. Like, like Enzo was. Like Enzo.

So that's Big Brother One. That's Big Brother One. I hope you guys enjoyed this. Again, Big Brother One, not the most interesting season to talk about, but I think this was a very fun and interesting conversation. Yeah, I thought we had fun. And I think that this was like a great little appetizer of like, watch this space every Thursday at seven. Karen's gonna be back with another week of Big Brother until there is live Big Brother.

I assume we've got your, like, brother needs cover. We'll figure something else out to do. And then you have to do BBOTT and then you celebrate seasons. Yeah. Look back at that. Big brother OTT, like looking back, I think people would like that.

I bet they would actually, yeah, because it's incredibly difficult to watch nowadays. I don't even know if you can. You'd have to just get people that were, you know, I don't think you can watch it anywhere. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe that's a good question for the audience. Is it possible to even watch? Put that on the survey. Do you think it's possible to watch Big Brother OTT?

All right. Well, stay tuned next week, Thursday. I will be back with some fun guests and we'll talk through season two of Big Brother and we'll keep it going. Mari, I believe we'll be joining you for season two. So that's exciting. Yes. So stay tuned for that. Make sure you vote in the survey if you want a say on who goes on the poster. And this is like Big Brother 2000.

Well, it would be like big with a 2000 visit. So call in at 1-888. Cast your vote. Press two for Dr. Will. Press three for Bunkie.

Wow. They're all the big names. Oh, by the way, Dr. Will is about to make his reality TV return also before we get. It'll be a big week for Big Brother too because Dr. Will will be back on Deal or No Deal Island season two kicking off on Tuesday, January 7th. We also have a podcast coming up previewing Dr. Will on deal or no deal island that is going to be airing this weekend on Rob as a website.com.

There you go. Very exciting. Look, we, look, we timed this perfectly and we did that on purpose. Perfect timing. Yes. Big for big brother too. Also, as we look back from 2024, Kevin Jacobs, of course, over on the confessional, the reality TV newsletter has a new post up

The most interesting strategic moments in competitive reality TV in 2024. It's a great piece. You're going to want to check it out. You could read it for free at realitytvnewsletters.com. Very interesting, very exciting. What a great project from Kevin Jacobs. I love the, I love the, uh, the confessional. Yeah. Um, some big brother moments there. It's all really, you know what? This was, this was a good year. Good year for

All right, well, of course, I mean, you can find me over on Twitch. I will be doing some streams here and there, maybe talking about Big Brother occasionally. And we've got the soundbite tournament. Soundbite tournament was great. Would you, I can spoil the soundbite tournament for you Rob. What's it? What was it this?

This should be our intro music for the podcast. This should be our intro music for the podcast. This should be our intro music for the podcast. This should be our intro music for the podcast. This should be our intro music for the podcast.

Yeah. I knew it was going to be Angela. Yeah. Angela dominated the leader. You should have a whole bracket. Like Angela versus the field.

Yes. Well, you can see fun things like the soundbite tournament for the early 26 over on my Twitch channel. We also have some scripted content over on We Know Scripted TV. I do a podcast called The Taste Makers where I talk about what's going on in the world TV and film and what's worth watching, what's worth ignoring. We're going to be doing our best of the year list very soon this week, so stay tuned for that.

And we might have some, maybe some jet lag coverage coming soon as their hide and seek season comes to a close.

Check out all of our traders previews. Traders is going to be back one week from tonight, Thursday, the 9th, and R.E.J.P. traders is returning for season two. That's going to be airing live this Saturday. I believe noon on our YouTube channel at Rob is website.com slash YouTube. Yes. All right. Well,

Like I said, hopefully you enjoyed this. If you follow along throughout the entire off season, maybe we'll have a little bit of a, maybe I'll have a little bit of a treat for you at the end, who knows, especially if you like this podcast. So, listen, stay tuned, keep watching. You'll find out what it is. But that's what we have for you. Thank you all so much for joining us here today. And we'll see all of you next time.