'Big Brother' is TV gone bad

By DIANE ROBERTS

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 6, 2000

Just when you thought television couldn't get any stupider, tackier, trashier, more venal, more vulgar, or more downright moronic, along comes CBS' new hyped-to-the-backteeth entry in the video voyeurism stakes, Big Brother.

Ten people will be cooped up inside a small house with 28 cameras, 60 microphones, and only one bathroom. Moreover, they won't have enough grocery money, so they'll have to bet on the outcome of various pointless tasks they'll be set in order to give them something to do all day and us something to watch. Presumably, the losers will go hungry. And every other week viewers can vote to expel one of the inmates, who will then be ritually humiliated in an "interview" with Julie Chen of the Early Show. The last one left wins $500,000.

Big Brother is like the bastard child of Smackdown! and the Jerry Springer Show, another in the long witless line of "reality" TV from COPS to Survivor. The network is betting that audiences just can't gawk enough at people impelled by greed to eat rats, sleep in the dirt, and do without moisturizer for an inordinate period of time. And the network is probably right. Big Brother will gain a vast viewership by taking things to sadistically-satisfying extremes, letting viewers determine the cast's fate. It's similar to that famous psychology experiment where one set of people were told they could inflict electric shock on another set of people with no consequences and so proceeded to inflict maximum pain. Conclusion: People are mean. Further conclusion: People like to watch suffering and degradation.

Naturally audiences (and CBS) trust that the fame-mongering souls immured in the Big Brother house will misbehave: fighting over who gets the top bunk, fighting over the bathroom (a 10-to-1 people-to-potty ratio is not a happy thought), even fighting over food when the hens don't lay and the bean crop fails -- maybe they'll have to re-enact the Donner Party. Since sex is pretty much out of the question, actual fisticuffs are the best we can hope for here. But what's next, a TV show in which recently-divorced people are locked in a Motel 6 room for three weeks with just one bag of peanut M&Ms between them? A program where survivalists stalk each other with slingshots in the Colorado high country until only one is left alive?

CBS was once known as the Tiffany network. Now it's more like the flea market network. It isn't merely that Big Brother plays to the lowest common denominator, CBS is also blurring the ever-fuzzier line between news and entertainment. Chen is a newsreader and calls herself a journalist. But finding out what rejected cast members have to say is not exactly news. Still, Americans will be glued to the screen. Really, we're no better than the howling Roman mob who bellowed for more blood and more body parts on the Coliseum floor. As a nation, we need to get a life.

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