Big Brother Part IX: Jason Goes To Hell

A new season of Big Brother (the reality show that we all love to hate) has started up.  Usually, Big Brother only runs during the summer.  However, as a result of the Writer's Strike, an early season was announced.  One can presume that it was assumed by the folks over at CBS that the Writer's Strike would last far into the summer.  Hence, an early season of the often-ridiculed Big Brother probably seemed like the ideal solution.  It's a cheap show to produce (seriously, how much does it cost to furnish a house with damaged merchandise from the IKEA store?) and it doesn't require any writers.

Of course, as soon as this latest group of house guests moved in, the Writer's Strike was promptly settled.

And so it goes.

Anyway, this season of Big Brother is entitled 'Til Death Do Us Part and it basically steals a page from the old Paradise Hotel rulebook -- all of the house guests have been paired up into teams ("soul mates," as host Julie Chen would put it).  How exactly it was determined that these folks are all "soul mates" hasn't really been commented upon beyond some generic references to "personality tests."  Perhaps they were all required to create a profile with E-Harmony before they moved in.

It's a bit of silly concept and quite a few of the house guests are understandably miffed.  One -- aging former model Sheila -- has apparently spent the past two weeks weeping over the discovery that her soul mate is a troll-like gentleman named Adam.  Another couple -- Jen and Ryan -- were already dating before going into the Big Brother house.  Once they arrived, they were promptly informed that they actually weren't soul mates.  As a result, Ryan has been paired up with an apparent psychopath named Allison (but a cute psychopath) and Sheila is working with a self-described member of the paparazzi.

Unlike, say, Survivor or the Amazing Race, Big Brother is not a show you watch in search of a chance to see any real competition or strategies.  Big Brother is a show that you watch the same way you watch a train wreck.  You watch it to see just how stupid things can possibly get when a bunch of shallow, good-looking people (and one or two token freaks) are locked in a house together with no TV.  In many ways, it's reminiscent of one of Andy Warhol's Factory Films in that Big Brother actually manages to take stagnation to a level where just the extreme nothingness of it all becomes strangely entertaining.

Perhaps it's a sign of the fact that show was rather hastily put together, but this season has really outdid itself as far as filling the Big Brother House with some of the most shallow, annoying, occasionally repellent house guests ever.  Seriously, I have watched each show and I have even sat through a few hours of the live feed.  I have sat there in the belief that, at some point over the course of 24 hours, even the stupidest of idiots will accidentally say something witty or insightful.

This season of Big Brother has not only challenged that belief but it has destroyed my faith in accidental insight.

It has proven that some people are just not there.

And most of them apparently live in the Big Brother house.

That said, it is a visually appealing cast (now if only they would never speak) and their total inability to grasp concepts like irony, sarcasm, and humor does make them oddly watchable (my favorite Big Brother moment so far: everyone takes a turn swearing on the bible that they're not keeping any secrets because, of course, if they lie, they'll go straight to Hell.  And they'll probably discover that Hell is furnished by IKEA as well...).

However, the more I have watched, the more I have noticed that the majority of the house guests become less and less physically attractive the more you see them.  Every single one of them has the raw essentials to be good-looking but they're all missing something.  None of them really possess the spark to be truly memorable or sexy. 

The closest analogy I can make is to the actors who always used to show up playing various victims during the early days of the slasher film.  These actors tended to show up in film after film and you never really learned their names but you always vaguely recognized them.  They were always just pretty enough to keep the adolescents in the audience happy without threatening to overshadow the actual stars of the films.  You always knew they were the ones who were going to end up having unprotected, premarital sex or smoking weed out in the woods and you always knew that Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers was going to kill them.

And, try as you might, you could never bring yourself to really care one way or the other.

It's as if CBS rounded up all the summer camp counselors on their way to Camp Blood and locked them in the Big Brother House instead.