Big Brother USA

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'Big Brother': Are you just a snoozy
sibling?

July 7, 2000
Web posted at: 3:32 PM EDT (1932 GMT)

By Frank Pellegrini

The realer it gets, the more boring it becomes.

Armed with the castaway megahit "Survivor"
as a lead-in, "Big Brother" debuted Wednesday
night to find that everyone was still watching.
Overall, CBS' winner-take-all,
sensory-deprivation version of "Real World"
was a brick house, with a 13.9 Nielsen rating
-- not much drop-off from the 15.1 garnered
by "Survivor." But unlike its Gilliganesque lead-in, which consistently picks up
viewers as it goes along, the hour-long opener of "Brother" slipped in viewership
numbers over the hour. On Thursday night, the drift of eyeballs continued --
against a "Friends" rerun, of all things -- and netted an 8.2 rating.

That's still not bad. But clearly, viewers are discovering that the reality of 10
thrown-together housemates is a little too much like, well, reality to be riveting
viewing five days a week.

Thursday night's episode was more of the setup we saw on Wednesday,
featuring the mostly unremarkable roommates taking the tour of their "house"
and "yard" (complete with the chickens they didn't eat on "Survivor") and
making eyes at the ubiquitous hidden cameras. (It's actually all an elaborate set
on the CBS lot, and a pretty nice one at that, in an IKEA sort of way). Oh yeah,
and getting to know each other -- sitting around the table, swapping life stories,
figuring out who sleeps where. They seem an earnest bunch, from the boring
father of three to the perky-and-boring beauty queen to the boring Minnesota
punk virgin. The possible exception: "Mega," the Samuel L. Jackson wannabe.
But he's trying too hard to be the star. He's merely faintly annoying.

Fascinated yet?

"Real World," at least, sends its housemates out and about. There is
drunkenness, quickie sex, day jobs and other variables that help the show birth
its soap-opera story lines. On "Big Brother," there isn't even a trip to the grocery
store. It's live, real-time (though the shows are recaps of the day's action)
footage of 10 folks crammed into a house with only each other for stimuli.

CBS execs, however, will take the current ratings gladly. And they're betting "Big
Brother" is a growth show; with the close quarters, the eliminations and the
viewer voting, some rats-in-a-tunnel friction is bound to pop up sooner or later,
and with it the kind of unpredictable human drama that fascinates us so.

It'd better -- or we might become more interested in those poor chickens.

Copyright © 2000 Time Inc.

[Dit bericht is gewijzigd door Re (Datum 08 Juli 2000).]

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