Big Brother 20 episode 1: Survivor fan recap – I, Robot
Survivor is months away, so we’ll make do with Big Brother 20 and compare the premiere episode with our favorite reality show.
Survivor and Big Brother, though they serve different audiences, have a commonality in their gameplay. We brought it up yesterday, but there is a lot about this show that plays similar to the island competition. Big Brother 20 debuted last night, playing a lot slower than anything we’ve seen in recent history. We’ve been asking for two-hour Survivor premieres, but the BB House has us regretting that request!
Per usual, Big Brother 20 started out by introducing half the cast in small vignettes, faking shock over receiving a house key and talking about their lifestyle. I said it last year, but if we could find a two-hour premiere of Survivor that has each of the castaways sharing their personality for ~20 minutes (one minute per player) that ends on Night 3, it would be better than burying ~25% of the cast in the introduction.
As the first eight houseguests entered the BB house, it became evident just how young the players skewed. Most players got to talk to the camera, but due to just how slowly today’s content was drawn out, all we got to hear was who was awkward, who caught feelings for one another and general banality.
Once all 16 gathered together, you started to see the real crazies of Big Brother 20 take flight. You have two people who believe in the healing power of crystals (one of which goes by “Rockstar”), a day trader babysitter who calls himself Swaggy C and wears self-branded shirts, and a dude who says he was an undercover cop sweating bullets and talking about drug rooms.
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I’m skipping over the intimate details of these 16 players because the Big Brother 20 premiere was a giant waste of time. After 45 minutes of milling about, host Julie Chen brought everyone to the living room to instruct them to go outside and stand on a platform in two teams of four men and four women.
Instead of doing some sort of team-based challenge, the two groups were split into their own challenges. JC, Tyler, Kaycee, Angela, Brett, Bayleigh, Rachel and Winston were sent into a black-out room filled with slime and goop, with seven retrieving “escape” envelope that let them out. One of those envelopes was an “escape and play” card that let them compete in a final challenge to keep eight of 16 players safe in the game.
That left Faysal, Haleigh, Kaitlyn, Angie, Sam, Scottie, Steve and Swaggy C stacking giant blocks to spell “HOUSEGUEST” while suspended on a bungee cord. The last place player in each game was set to receive a big punishment to run through the first live eviction of the Big Brother 20 season.
As you can tell from just the description, the discrepancy in challenge difficulty is night and day. It took the quickest of the second group just a few rounds to stack their blocks, and the meek Scottie came second in the challenge right behind Swaggy. Meanwhile, the first eight needed heavy showers to get all their green goop out, and some still had some stuck to them after.
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Furthermore, the winner of each challenge (Swaggy C and Angela) had the opportunity to strike a deal before they even saw the deciding challenge, allowing them to potentially collude together if both could pick any players they wanted. All of this latter stuff happened with both Sam and Kaycee out of the house, as the two finished in last place within their respective groups.
Big Brother is decidedly a winner-takes-all game from the beginning, and I understand that it’s different from the way Survivor starts out in two or more tribes. However, by mixing players playing for themselves and forcing them into random groups right off the bat, it creates an artificial alliance immediately.
The winner of the deciding challenge (stand on a surfboard until the other player drops) has the opportunity to pick two groups of four who entered the house at the same time, effectively making a soft immunity alliance of eight. They also get to compete in the Head of Household competition (that’s in the second episode), creating a power imbalance that may last through to Day 99.
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Finally, Kaycee has a unitard that forces her to stay in the room when the necklace starts spinning, and Lisa is a freaking robot for most of a week within the Big Brother‘s first elimination cycle. She does get some downtime in the house, but when “robot online” is announced, she must control a robotic avatar.
All of this happens on Day 1, which is unfathomable and borderline unfair. Of course, Big Brother always tells you to expect the unexpected, and the show is blatant in the way it rigs the stakes in favor of who they want to win. Swaggy C eventually stays up on the board to win the deciding vote, picking Scottie, Rockstar, Kaycee, Rachel, Haleigh, Faysal and Brett to stay safe.
Our premiere episode of Big Brother 20 was a slow, drawn-out affair that could have easily been squished into episode two if they cut out all the unnecessary silliness. Now fans have the opportunity to give houseguests punishments or rewards by voting for them in surveys, causing them to trend to benefits or crash to punishments.
Next: Survivor: Ranking 35 seasons
You thought Survivor Ghost Island was bad? We saw too many twists, turns and nods to past Big Brother players and moments in the season 20 premiere that it could rival the first half of Survivor‘s season 36! Thankfully, we’re only covering through the first elimination of the season, so you can get the rest of your fix with Inside the BB House; our sister site.