Big Brother always seemed like a show that should live online. The very idea is that the subjects in the house are being viewed and judged 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Though the internet wasn’t as prevalent (or as fast) in 2000 when the show debuted in the US, it’s since grown a very loyal following who do that round the clock judging – watching every meal the houseguests eat, listening to every inane conversation they have, and documenting the minute changes in game play on very detailed fan websites.
That’s why Big Brother: Over the Top, the show’s 19th season, is the perfect series for CBS to present online only. For the past two summers, anyone who subscribes to CBS All Access, the networks streaming service that launched in 2014, has had access to the Big Brother live feeds. However those were only for the dedicated superfans, while most casual fans would watch the three weekly broadcasts on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Yes, for Big Brother even a casual fan still needs to give up three hours a week to follow the game. And there are quite a few of them, with 6.3 million tuning into the Big Brother 18 finale earlier this month.
Over the Top follows a similar format to the normal game, but everything airs online. Each Wednesday there will be a weekly highlight show that airs at 10pm ET followed by a live eviction of one of the houseguests. Each night there will be a daily highlight show boiling down the day’s squabbles, competitions, and assorted ceremonies. This allows viewers to mitigate their level of involvement, which could include anything from an hour a week to borrowing into their bed and staying glued to the computer for the next few months.
When the broadcast kicked off on 28 September, the episode started out the way any season of Big Brother beings, with each of the houseguests being introduced in their home and telling us a little bit about themselves. But then it gave us a taste of what Over the Top is going to be like. It showed each houseguest arriving in the house one at a time live.
Watching their introductions was sort of like the first trying days of college where everyone is trying to be friendly, desperately grasping for things they have in common, and sharing the same information (age, occupation, hometown) over and over again as a new person rang the doorbell and joined the party. While this whole process is usually edited down to a few wonderfully brief minutes of television, watching it play out in real time wasn’t quite like watching paint dry, but was sort of like watching the handyman applying a second coat and being unsure why you were supervising this mundane chore.
That’s when I decided I will never be more than a casual fan, tuning in once a week to keep up on the drama but not nearly interested enough to watch a former University of Texas cheerleader and a debt collector from Bangor, Maine, struggle to even find three minutes worth of commonalities. But the great thing about being a TV fanatic in 2016 is that we all have to option to decide how we want to watch something and when, including TV’s ultimate live experiment.
CBS should be commended for trying to push the boundaries not only of what is possible with a reality show, but what it’s possible to stream on the internet. This format, though old, is much more inventive and suited to the internet than anything that Hulu, Netflix, or Amazon has attempted. The closest anyone has come is Netflix’s Chelsea Handler talk show, and that format doesn’t seem to be working out all that well (but we’ll never really know since Netflix refuses to publish viewer stats).
Many will be looking at how Big Brother: Over the Top performs to see if it is a harbinger of the other online-only content the network is planning to roll out over the next year, like a new Star Trek series and a spin-off of The Good Wife. But that is much more traditional television fare that shouldn’t have a problem engaging with its rabid fan base. Big Brother, believe it or not, has a similar fan base and one that is already build into CBS All Access. The fact that All Access is serving that audience and building a truly unique show just for the internet is already a victory indeed.
