After 15 seasons, CBS’s ode to voyeurism is as popular as ever. Following its most controversial season yet, Big Brother executive producer Allison Grodner on where the show is heading, how the next set of twists provide a necessary revamp, and why she’ll never let go of the reins.
Sonja Flemming / CBS
The gist of George Orwell's acclaimed novel 1984 is that, in a surveillance state, big brother is always watching. And, since its inception in 1999, the world has watched the concept's namesake, Big Brother: a Dutch reality show created by John de Mol that, for several months, locks a dozen or so money-hungry people inside a camera-covered mansion, where their every moment is recorded.
CBS picked up the rights to the format in 2000 and, that July, launched an American version that averaged around 9 million viewers over the summer. Despite those ratings, a franchise high to this day, the U.S. Big Brother failed to replicate the uncontrollable frenzy that captured the Netherlands the previous year. In order to up the tension, CBS sought a new executive producer to reconfigure the format for American audiences for its second season.
Enter Allison Grodner, a writer-director with a background in documentaries who worked on History Channel's Modern Marvels, several animal documentaries, and a slew of inspirational teen-centric stories. Upon landing the job, Grodner quickly identified the show's biggest problem: Viewers controlled the weekly eliminations. While audience voting was, and still is, an integral component in nearly every other incarnation (versions of Big Brother have now aired in 50 countries), Grodner believed America's puritanical predisposition to vote for the ethically inclined contestants saddled Season 1 with a cast of vanilla players. So she handed eviction power over to the houseguests, encouraging a "survival of the most manipulative" mentality and — voilà! — reality TV gold was unearthed.
In the 14 well-rated seasons that followed, dozens of additional twists have been implemented (twins have secretly played as one person, exes have become unwitting opponents, singles have been paired up, viewers have dictated the actions of "America's Player") and later copied by other countries across the globe, making Grodner one of the most successful reality television executive producers currently working today.
That success has also turned Grodner into one of the genre's most controversial figures, on screen or off, in history. Every season, fans storm the message boards to gripe that she's manipulating the show's outcome through player coercion, vote rigging, or plain old cheating, and demand that CBS fire her.
On the eve of the Big Brother 16 premiere (which airs June 25 at 8 p.m. on CBS), BuzzFeed was granted a rare interview with Grodner inside her Big Brother office, a de facto command center conveniently adjacent to the Studio City, Calif., soundstage where 16 Americans will spend the next three months vying for $500,000.
As Grodner sat next to a flatscreen TV split into nearly a dozen smaller screens — each dedicated to a live camera feed from inside the house — she spoke candidly about her haters, the show's need for endless revamping, this year's game-changing twists, how she's kept Big Brother one of the "least manipulated reality shows on television," and much, much more. What follows is an edited and condensed transcript of the conversation.
The controversial cast of Big Brother 15.
CBS
When you joined Big Brother in Season 2, you quickly diverged from the audience voting component, which worked very well in other countries.
Allison Grodner: It just didn't work here.
Why not?
AG: The popular vote works for a talent based show like American Idol because you know what you're voting for; you're voting for a talent. In this case, what are you voting for? You're voting for a person. You're voting for their personality. So you're voting for, usually, the good people. And when you're voting for good people to stay, then the bad people — the villains — are leaving. So you don't have the conflict that you need for a show like this. We recognized that immediately and knew we had to turn the action of the show inside the house. We had to do something where the people in the bubble were working against each other so we could create the environment for power shifts and a hierarchy that will keep this what we turned it into: a reality soap opera. I just think it's an American sensibility to vote for good and to take the high ground. I think things might be different now that people now are very savvy to the reality TV of it all, and we've certainly allowed more popular votes into the show — and will continue to do so this season — but I think Big Brother works best when it's driven by the people inside the house.
Over the last 14 seasons, you've rejiggered the show every season, trying new twists. When you look at BB 16 do you feel like it's the best version of the show possible or simply another version?
AG: I don't know. And that's what I love about the show. You do everything you can to make sure you've kept it fresh, but this is unlike other types of reality shows where there's a lot of producing and scripting and outlining. This is about getting the right group of people, setting a framework, and saying, "Go!" And you kind of roll with it, hoping you made the best soup you could. Certainly, we know enough now to know what's probably going to work, but I can't say for certain until something happens. Obviously, there was last year — and we've had years before where people have left for various reasons or been kicked out of the house, but it's always something I didn't predict.
Since you brought it up, let's talk about Big Brother 15. Several of the houseguests were overheard making increasingly insensitive bigoted comments on the live feeds, statements that were, initially, not shown on the broadcast. One of the biggest fan complaints was that it felt like producers only ended up addressing the racist comments made by Aaryn Gries, GinaMarie Zimmerman, and others on air when the backlash became too big to ignore.
AG: We heard that a lot last year. What I will say is that this started happening early in the season and as much of a live show as this is, we're about a week behind until our first live show. The feeling is that we weren't addressing something that happened but we were in our catching up phase. At the same time — and I don't think we need to delve too much into this because we talked about this a lot last summer — but we wanted to show in the broadcasts what was ultimately important to the narrative and gameplay of what was happening in the house. And it was really important that, ultimately, the comments had context. When people ask me why I didn't show Aaryn on the hammock saying this or that and the other thing, the real reason was — beyond the narrative and the story we were telling — we felt it was important to have the other side. Once other people in the house heard it, it became story in the house and then it was put on TV. When it was just people saying ugly things in a corner and gossiping, it only existed online — which, as far as I'm concerned, is still part of our show. You don't want to put hate out there for hate's sake. Until we had that counterpoint and until it started to be heard, it didn't really become part of the broadcast story.
No comments:
Post a Comment