Big Brother’s producers on its format, 12 years ago

I'm revisiting this interview inspired by what happened on Big Brother 28 this week, which was basically a cast member, Jason, the only gay cast member on the entire show, There's no other queer people at all in the house, which really sucked for him, especially as the entire house ostracized him.

We won't get into that so much because I wrote about it.

I'll link that in the show notes.

And it's obviously an issue of casting and other things that we could talk about.

But I'm particularly interested in the way he exited the show, which was by being backdoored.

It's ironic that someone who has expressed some, let's say, quite homophobic views about drag and gay people in his social media and in the Big Brother house, Kamu is the one who ended up backdooring him just because that's a funny word.

But in the parlance of Big Brother, what that means is nominating people for eviction from the House who you don't actually intend to vote for, and instead waiting for them to play in the immunity competition known as the veto, and then replacing one of them on the nomination slate with the person who's your actual target.

So that's exactly what happened during this week of Big Brother and trying to get him out, but trying also not to let him play in that immunity competition.

This has been part of Big Brother's format for years, and the format is much more controlled than other shows like Survivor or The Traitors.

where you have one player who has a lot of power, they nominate people who are the only people who are at risk, and then those people, plus a few more, play for the chance to save one of those players, and then that's the veto competition.

And then, you know, the person who has all the power, the head of household, can then, you know, replace one of those nominees if necessary, or if that's their strategy.

But it basically ends up keeping things somewhat status quo during the week in the sense that, especially when there's like a big alliance as there is in the Big Brother 28 house right now of eight people, so a vast majority of the group, we essentially have this kind of like stasis that occurs where if the head of household is somebody who is on an alliance's side, they're not going to nominate any of their allies.

And the only real hope for Big Brother getting interesting is the next week for someone who's not in that alliance to get nominated, or to, sorry, to win head of household, take that power, and then things can get interesting.

Of course, people could shuffle around and break their alliances and those kinds of things, but they tend to not do that as much, probably because it's pretty risky and also because they feel safe or just want more TV time or whatever.