Advice to the Cast of Big Brother 16 (or Things I Wish I Knew before Walking into the BB12 House)

Number 1: Bring PUZZLE BOOKS and brainteasers with you to sequester. Use that time to get your mind ready for competitions. Practice memorization techniques. Think of sequester as an intensive training period. Make a list of past comps and strategize for them. If you’ve seen a BB competition in the past three years, you’ll likely compete in some variation of it.

Number 2: When Shawn tells you that you can’t wear shirts with art or logos, she’s not kidding. Go to American Apparel and buy as many solid shirts and shorts as you can afford, otherwise you’ll end up wearing the same tired V-neck all season long.

Number 3:You WILL be hated. Even the most popular BB contestants like Jeff and Jordan have a big chunk of viewers who loathe them. When you’re in the house, there’s an inverse relationship between how much you THINK America loves you and how much the audience ACTUALLY despises you. Every season, the houseguests who think they’re the “good guys” are the least liked players among viewers. Even if–scratch that–ESPECIALLY IF production intimates that America loves you, you’re probably not liked.  Notice how, on previous seasons, the villains are usually SHOCKED to learn America hated them.

Number 4: You have to play TWO games in the house. The first one is the actual Big Brother game, which includes competitions and manipulation of your fellow houseguests. The second game is the one you play with viewers and production. Be a big, memorable character and production will be invested in keeping you. Ever notice how game-changing plot twists tend to benefit beloved players like Rachel, Jeff, and Frank?

Number 5: Learn how to accept an apology and move forward. Do NOT hold grudges in the house. Your worst enemy one week could be your best and most unexpected ally the next. Imagine how season 12 would have ended if Brendon and I would have aligned after our blowout fights. (FTR, I tried to make it happen.)

Number 6: Avoid the following BB clichés:

• Even though I encourage you to accept apologies and forge alliances with enemies, don’t tell them, “What makes this brilliant is that NOBODY WILL SEE THIS COMING.”
• “Wait until you see the tapes!”
• It’s fine to mention “back door” but NOT if it’s in reference to somebody who played in the veto. If the person played in veto, it’s not a back door. Period.
• “Floater” is the most commonly misused cliché in the house. Let’s clear up some misconceptions about floaters. First, floaters avoid winning competitions. Second, a floater isn’t just a floater because he or she is not playing into YOUR hand. Finally, floating is a legitimate strategy that frequently wins the game. Floater is only a bad word when it’s used by somebody who doesn’t understand its definition.
• Don’t compare yourself to other players. The most memorable characters carve out a niche for THEMSELVES, they don’t try to be the “next” Will or Britney.

Number 7: If you have a twisted sense of humor, squelch it in the house. Your haters have no sense of irony. They’ll capture video of you making a tasteless but hilarious joke, then they’ll send the footage to your boss. That joke you made about your competitor filming child porn will, in their eyes, mean YOU film kiddy porn. Your haters will be relentless, so they may get you fired. Don’t give them ammunition.

Number 8: Want to figure out the week’s storylines? The questions you’re asked in the diary room can help you figure out your cast’s villains and heroes. Important note: One week’s hero may be next week’s villain and vice versa.

Number 9: Prepare your boss for potential fallout of you doing the show. Chances are, fans WILL contact him or her. CBS offers NOTHING in terms of preparing your employer for backlash. You’re likely a casual viewer of the show, so you have no idea how crazy some of the live feeder viewers prove to be each year. And their animus gets exponentially worse with each new season. They’ll create FB pages dedicated to hating you. They’ll call your boss over and over and over again. Anything that can be taken out of context and used against you WILL BE USED TO SABOTAGE YOU IN THE REAL WORLD. If memory serves me, BB13’s Shelly Moore was fired (or nearly fired) for her “relentless bullying” of Rachel, as if my friend RACHEL could be bullied by ANYONE. The big piece of evidence used against Shelly: One time, she threw one of Rachel’s stuffed animals over a fence. It doesn’t matter how innocuous the offense, some of these fans are crazy and brutal, which is a dangerous combination. YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE TO THEIR VITRIOL. Show your boss this blog. The more you can prepare him or her, the better off you’ll be.

Number 10: You also need to prepare your loved ones for hearing a lot of nasty things about you. They should not take the bait. The minute they start defending you or making statements in a public forum about the show, the audience considers them fair game. They’ll be as horrible to your friends and family as they are to you. The best thing they can do is keep a low profile and stay off fan forums.

Number 11: Your “fame” will last for a year. Don’t let your ego get the best of you. Once the new cast comes out, nobody cares about you. In two years, few people will even realize you were ever on TV. The more you invest in your fleeting fame, the rougher it’ll be for you to deal with the transition back to anonymity.

Number 12: After the show, don’t quit your day job. The houseguests who don’t go back to work after the show have lives that sadly revolve around BB. Big Brother is a fun divergence, like summer camp, it’s NOT a career. Nobody ever looked at a 35-year-old camp counselor and said, “You had so much fun at camp that you decided to turn it into a lifestyle. And I ADMIRE that.”

All that said, you’re about to have the time of your life. If you take my advice to heart, all the negative blowback will be worth it. Every time you step onto a competitive apparatus, remember that all of this is for YOU. Never doubt how lucky you are to play the game.

Videos to Supplement my Big Brother Scholarship

In 2013, Critical Studies in Media Communication published my autoethnographic investigation of CBS’s Big Brother. If you assign the essay in a class you teach, you might consider showing your students the videos embedded in this entry. The first video features a montage of crying scenes I detail in the first half of the article. The second video focuses on themes explored in the second half of the paper, like the tropes of gay contagion and the gay pretender.

Trope of the Crying Gay Man

Trope of the Gay Pretender

Post-Big Brother Survival Guide

Here are 10 things I wish I would have known after the season finale:

1. Post-Traumatic Stress. Feel disoriented? Overwhelmed by crowds? Forget what you’re saying in the middle of a sentence? That disorientation is part of the post-show experience and will get better as the year progresses.
2. One year is the new 15 minutes. The sweet, blinding aura of pseudo fame will last for about a year, less if you live in a major city like Los Angeles or New York. Big Brother notoriety’s like Velveeta. It’s cheesy, delicious, and has an expiration date. Enjoy it before it curdles.
3. Don’t quit your day job. Almost every former houseguest who quits or loses his or her job has turned into a shadow of himself/herself. The ones who continue to define themselves in terms of Big Brother achievements are canaries in the coal mine.  Don’t follow them down that path of self-destruction. If you haven’t done so already, get back to work ASAP. Big Brother is a summer camp you MIGHT get to attend 2 or 3 times. Big Brother is NOT a career.
4. “Reality star” is a contradiction in terms. You aren’t a star, except in your mother’s eyes. Avoid saying shit like “my fans.” You were on Big Brother, not The Sopranos. Not even “celebrities” on Big Brother UK’s celebrity edition are celebrities.
5. Their hate is NOT the measure of your character, it’s the measure of their own. Many of you are starting to understand the paradox of BB fandom: the people who complain about YOU “bullying” other houseguests are now the ones who won’t stop bothering you. They dislike you because, in a unique and torturous situation, you temporarily engendered everything they despise about themselves.
6. Production never calls to say “hi.” If they’re calling, they want you to do something for them. And they probably want you to do it for free.
7.  “There’s no such thing as bad press,” unless you’ve been on a reality show. Bad press may keep a select few celebrity train wrecks in the public eye. Unless your name is Lindsay Lohan, the “no such thing as bad press” rule does NOT apply to you. And Lindsay Lohan would not be caught dead on Big Brother, not even UK’s “celebrity” edition.
8. Don’t become a bitter Betty. Every cast breeds a few people who  feel f’d over by Big Brother. Maybe the person’s upset because she was the first out, or maybe she can’t take fan heat. Don’t come down with a case of the bitters. Always appreciate the unique opportunity you were given.
9. Stay off fan forums! But when you DO go on them, remember that you’re dealing with people who opted to spend their summers in front of a computer WATCHING YOU. After you attend your first fan event (which I don’t encourage), you’ll finally see what you’re TRULY up against and all the mean words will become comical.
10. This too shall pass. If you’re encountering a lot of hate, it’ll die down. Better still, you’ll develop super thick skin and be able to better cope with faceless, nameless people attacking you. “One year is the new 15 minutes” applies to fan hate as much as it does fan love.

Big Brother & the Race Card Paradox

Some people don’t understand that the term “race card” also refers to the exploitation of racism by racists. A common form of racism, for example, involves painting people of color as overly sensitive or reactionary when they rightfully point out racism. Paradoxically, when people claim that Candice and Howard are “playing the race card,” their critics—both inside and outside of the house—are the ones actually guilty of playing it. My point is illustrated in the following two scenarios:

Scenario 1: A majority of the Big Brother house votes out one of Aaryn’s allies. Aaryn places the blame for this move on a black person (Candice). She flips Candice’s mattress on the floor, taunts her with race-baiting stereotypes, and laughs as her ally GinaMarie repeatedly mentions Candice’s race. When Candice discusses and cries about the sustained abuse she’s suffered in the house, she is NOT “playing the race card.”

Scenario 2: Amanda Zuckermann has called Andy “Faggoty Ann,” said Candice’s hair is  “greasy and nappy,” characterized Helen (a Korean) as “the fucking Chinaman,” and referred to the “the black guy, the Asian, and the gay guy” as the “three outcasts.” CBS has shockingly made Amanda the primary narrator of Aaryn’s racism. Producers have also featured scenes wherein Amanda directly confronts Aaryn about her racial animus. Now that Aaryn’s in power, Amanda has backpedaled and told Aaryn that she does not think she is racist and claims people like African American contestant Howard use the “race card” to get ahead in the game. If anyone in the house plays a “race card,” or exploits racism, it’s Amanda, who shifts between vocalizing racist speech, deriding other people’s racism, and suggesting racism in the house is not real.

Candice and Howard have displayed enviable comportment in the face of sustained acts of racial antagonism. Claiming that either of them plays a “race card” is in itself racist, especially when one considers how the cast’s two African American contestants have, time and again, refused to directly respond to race-baiting hate speech.

Final rumination: I feel like CBS’s racism edit has been unfair to Aaryn, given that producers have placed the exclusive onus of racism on her shoulders. Spencer and GinaMarie, in particular, have fanned bigotry’s flames as often as Aaryn, yet their vitriol has not made it to CBS’s edit of the show. Racism and homophobia are unfortunately common, ordinary, everyday phenomena. When Big Brother constructs a narrative that suggests anti-gay and anti-people of color speech is extraordinary and relegated to a single person in the house, the show misses the point. I am thrilled that the program’s awesome production team has taken the first step in telling a complicated story about racism and homophobia. I just worry that they’ll miss an opportunity to go beyond the first step. Ratings jumped by over a million viewers when the initially included racism into the plot. Viewers are clearly ready for a more nuanced discussion about race and sexuality in the house. Go further, dig deeper. I believe in you, Big Brother. 

A Scholarly Examination of and by Big Brother’s “Sob-o-teur”

My latest article, “‘You are Not Allowed to Talk About Production’: Narratization on and off the Set of CBS’s Big Brother,” was recently published in Critical Studies in Media Communication. The essay is FREE TO VIEW for a limited time by clicking here. 

An excerpt: 

Season 12 was dubbed Big Brother’s ‘‘Season of Sabotage.’’ Upon moving into the house, Julie Chen announced that one of the contestants was a saboteur. ‘‘Their [sic] mission is to sabotage your game and wreak as much havoc as possible. This person can sabotage an individual, a group, or all of you.’’ Before the thirteen of us moved into the house, producers selected Big Brother 12’s only lesbian houseguest Annie to be the first saboteur of the season. She was ultimately eliminated from the competition in the first week. In week five, U.S. viewers voted for me to become the season’s second saboteur. The saboteur role extends a history of gay antagonists in film and television. Media critics have documented how gay, lesbian, and bisexual characters tend to be depicted as villains (Gross, 2001; Raymond, 2003) in Disney movies (Dundes & Dundes, 2006; Morton, 1996), witches and psychos in canonical films (Doty, 2000), and perverts and child molesters in the news (Streitmatter, 2009). Not surprisingly, both production and viewers cast the only gay and lesbian characters in season 12 as villains who, by default, had to disrupt gameplay and antagonize their roommates. Regardless of producers’ and audience members’ motives, homosexuality has been used throughout TV history to ‘‘establish an additional level of deviance for [villainous] characters’’ (Dow, 2001, p. 129). Annie and I, like so many gay and lesbian characters before us, were situated as ‘‘a problem disrupting heterosexuals’ lives and expectations’’ (Fejes & Petrich, 1993, p. 401) and an ‘‘evil to be destroyed’’ (Fejes & Petrich, 1993, p. 398). Everyone in the house knew about the saboteur and wanted him or her gone, but none of the contestants knew his or her identity.