Huge Brother hits its twenty fifth anniversary on Saturday, July 5, simply 5 days earlier than the premiere of its new season on Thursday, July 10. And the present’s Season 1 viewers would hardly acknowledge the CBS actuality present in Season 27. Huge Brother’s first season, which premiered weeks after Survivor’s debut, was vastly totally different than the model of the present followers know and love now.
In Huge Brother’s collection premiere, the Season 1 houseguests arrived in particular person SUVs — escorted by police on bikes! — however that motorcade may need been essentially the most high-budget part of the season. In comparison with modern-day Huge Brother homes, the Season 1 domicile was bland and primary, with the entire environment of a dorm frequent space. (There was a vegetable backyard and a hen coop, nonetheless.)
Thus started a marathon of episodes. For that first season, Huge Brother aired six nights per week, that means viewers needed to dedicate a lot of their weekly TV viewing to the present in the event that they needed to see all 70 episodes — sure, 70 episodes — and catch all of the motion — or, extra precisely, all of the inaction.
San Francisco Chronicle critic John Carman referred to as out Season 1 for its boring storylines, in comparison with reveals like The Actual World that had fewer and thus better-edited episodes. “Is it potential that watching 10 strangers make a potato-powered clock is one spud shy of Tiffany leisure on CBS?” Carman wrote.
And sure, there have been solely 10 contestants in that first season. One standout was Jamie Kern Lima, a former magnificence queen who later returned to headlines in 2016, when she offered her IT Cosmetics to L’Oréal for $1.2 billion and earned roughly $410 million from the deal, in response to Forbes. (She’s presently tied with Kylie Jenner on Forbes’ record of America’s Richest Self-Made Girls.)
Additionally, it was the general public who “banished” houseguests in Season 1, and people eliminations got here each two weeks. The houseguests may nominate their fellow gamers for elimination, however the ultimate resolution lay with viewers. (A contestant named William was the primary individual banished from the present, and he really pumped his fists in jubilation.) And with viewers in cost, lots of the extra antagonistic Season 1 gamers have been voted out early, robbing the present of drama.
The primary season had a distinct theme track — with a Muzak-level saxophone solo — and one among Season 1’s many weird home actions concerned the ultimate 5 houseguests penning lyrics for that theme after which recording a music video. (Season 2 launched a brand new theme track, maybe as a result of viewers couldn’t un-hear the so-called “Huge Brother 5” singing “Into Our Lives” horribly off-key.)
Julie Chen’s internet hosting efficiency acquired a whole lot of flak from viewers and critics, and she or he later instructed Leisure Tonight she was too beholden to her unique news-anchor ambitions. “I used to be attempting to examine, like, they will’t say no to me at 60 Minutes sooner or later as a result of I did this,” she recalled. “So I used to be attempting to be very 60 Minutes on Huge Brother. And it was the improper lane to be in. It didn’t work. … My mistake was, I didn’t absolutely embrace it for what it was, which is why they ended up calling me the Chenbot. I used to be so stiff and robotic in entrance of the cameras.”
Chen wasn’t even Huge Brother’s sole emcee like she is now. At first, a “Huge Brother reporter” named Ian O’Malley supplied home excursions and interviews with relations. As producers fiddled with Season 1’s format, nonetheless, O’Malley was there one week and gone the subsequent. “I do know the present sucked. And nonetheless does,” O’Malley instructed Actuality Blurred in 2017. “I look again at my six weeks on the lot at CBS and BB with a combination of aid that I acquired out comparatively unscathed.”
Chen additionally introduced on “Regina Lewis from America On-line” — sure, that’s AOL, one other signal of Season 1’s turn-of the-millennium instances — as an everyday visitor to speak about fan chatter and the present’s 24/7 webcasts. “The net exercise is unprecedented,” Lewis claimed, dubiously, in a single phase.
As Season 1 slogged on, viewers revolted, some even calling the present a “practice wreck” on-line, because the Los Angeles Instances reported. Huge Brother producers even broke its personal guidelines, permitting exterior contact by letting contestants discuss to relations, and launched twists like providing houseguests $50k to stroll away and get replaced by a brand new contestant. Amid such machinations, viewers sensed community execs and Huge Brother producers’ “bare, unadulterated concern, nay, panic,” within the phrases of 1 viewer. Somebody (or some ones) even employed a airplane to fly over the home, towing a banner studying “Huge Brother is worse than you assume. Get out now.”
Viewers have been actually getting out. The present’s scores took a dive in Season 1, going from a collection premiere that attracted 22 million viewers to an installment that acquired overwhelmed by a COPS episode the next Saturday, as Leisure Weekly reported on the time.
However then-CBS boss Les Moonves — who would marry Chen 4 years later — refused to say die. “I’m not going to simply accept that Huge Brother didn’t accomplish that nicely,” he instructed reporters at a Tv Critics Affiliation occasion on the time, per TV Information. “Huge Brother did simply high quality and, in truth, improved our summer season scores and our summer season demographics.”
Moonves did have notes for producers, nonetheless. He mentioned Season 1 was “[not] forged very nicely” and that the gameplay was “not as well-thought-out” as that of Survivor. “I don’t assume [producers] adopted up on a number of the extra attention-grabbing issues that have been happening in the home,” he added. “In reviewing a number of the tapes in a while, there have been extra provocative storylines that would have been adopted that have been dropped.”
Season 2, premiering precisely a yr after Season 1, combined up the format. This time, the present aired 3 times per week, and the houseguests competed for energy (and the all-important Head of Family place) and voted on one another’s eliminations, now referred to as evictions.
The Chenbot, nonetheless, remained.
Huge Brother, Season 27 Premiere, Thursday, July 10, 8/7c, CBS