The Age of Innocence for a Very Guilty Show
By Ben Alexander
(aka Infidel In The Temple)
April 26, 2005
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 Julie Chen informed houseguest Jamie Kern (left) of what was to be her prize for her recent victory in some competition. She was going to have a two-minute visit with a very important guest who had come all the way to the "Big Brother" studio to see her. The catch was, she would have to choose between two guests. One was big-time Hollywood casting director Anthony Sepulveda; the other was Mom.
Well, Jamie explained, she'd be seeing Mom soon anyway, but she might never have another chance to meet with big-time Hollywood casting director Anthony Sepulveda. So, with regrets to Mom, she went with the casting director. A door opened, and Jamie went backstage to meet Mr. Sepulveda. He smiled. She smiled. He asked her about her acting experience and her interests. She told him all about it. She said she planned to move to L.A. when the "Big Brother" season was done. And, just as the two minutes were about to expire, he told her that, when she moved to L.A., she should "sign up for an acting course, and really commit to it." The message boards were just buzzing that night about what an evil bitch Jamie was for "choosing career over family." Some fans suggested that, when the time came for Jamie to get evicted, her mother should tell her she couldn't go meet her because now she had a casting director to see. The following week's live broadcast showed some interviews in Jamie's home town. "She's going to have to live with that on her conscience for the rest of her life," said one young woman. Jamie had her defenders too, of course. Thus, her decision was controversial. It was the controversy of the week, in fact. What an age of innocence "Big Brother" must have been in that summer, that this could stir such emotions! See,  that was the summer that "Big Brother" was the laughingstock of the network for being so boring. Paul Romer (right) must have known as the days went on that his days of producing "Big Brother," at least in the U.S., were numbered. "Like watching paint dry" was how some people characterized it. The most controversy-prone hamsters had already been voted off the show by the midpoint, and what they had left was a bunch of nice people who liked each other. Sure, Eddie had a foul mouth, and sure, Jamie was a bit vain, but they still functioned like real people living in a house together, getting along. They couldn't have put a worse curse on the producers than that.
So, the producers scrambled and struggled to manufacture every controversy they could. They did what they could to stir up tensions, with one cheap trick after another. The houseguests knew what the producers were doing, too: The live feed updates of that season showed houseguests having a good laugh on it. A couple of them one night were saying dramatically saying "I hate you" and "I hate you too" for the kitchen cameras, and Curtis remarked at one point that the following day's challenge was probably going to be "Beat a houseguest to death, billy clubs are in the storage bin." Later in the season, in fact, they even resorted to trying to get somebody to take a buy-out in order to bring in a new, spicier hamsterette to shake things up. It didn't work. (Click here for more on that act of desperation.) And the thing with Jamie and the casting director: just another cheap trick to stir up a controversy. Consider this. Jamie had made clear that she aspired to a Hollywood career. They were able to count on her to choose the casting director, so they set it up confidently. If she'd chosen Mom, the  producers would have been thwarted (which they were on some other occasions, with their efforts). Of course, realistically, Jamie might just as well have chosen Mom for all the good that Sepulveda was going to do for her career, but it would have been unrealistic to expect Jamie to see it that way at the time. What she did, truth be told, was what just about any ambitious actor or other sort of performer would have done. Big breaks are hard to get. From their point of view, you don't just throw opportunities away, and Mom should understand. Again, this was not a real opportunity for anything, but there was no way Jamie was going to see it so clearly at the time.
It  was after that season that Arnold Shapiro (above, left) took the reins of "Big Brother." Now, there would be no more Jamies and casting directors. Now there would be Justin and the knife incident (right), Nicole and her Zanax, Shannon and the toothbrush, the ex-factor, project DNA, and a host of other dramas and incidents that would make anything that happened during the first season look tame and lame.Actually, to say that the show got more dangerous because season one was so boring would miss a key point. Even if season one had been a smash, the producers would still have felt the need to spice it up some more, which in practical effects would mean making it more dangerous. There's a principle in marketing that a commodity's intensity level of gratification needs to increase rather than staying the same, in order for the commodity to sustain its market. When the voyeuristic novelty of watching a bunch of real people share a house wears off, there need to be new sources of novelty with increasingly high stakes involved. So the producers need more volatile personalities, more precarious situations, and more of everything dramatic, if they want to sustain and expand their audience year after year. And this, my friends, is why "Big Brother," which was a dangerous idea from the get-go, is now all the more a nervous breakdown or other calamity waiting to happen. |