While Big Brother 21 toils in bullying, Survivor tries to push forward

Big Brother 21 has finally shown its players engaging in bullying on television, reminiscent of the show’s recent history. Thankfully, Survivor’s cases are few and far between.

Spoilers for Big Brother 21 and past seasons of Survivor, including Game Changers’ finale, One World, and Redemption Island. Additional content warning: bullying and suicide.

Despite Big Brother and Survivor both being competition games based on social dynamics and strategic gameplay, how they play, the key demographics and acceptable behavior from players of each show are night and day. Survivor can be equal parts survival, building trust in people you know, winning challenges and finding dozens of idols, but Big Brother can be won and lost purely by how you interact with others.

Not only that but because of the structures of the games (Survivor required 39 days; an infantile number compared to Big Brother’s 99-plus days), casting dynamics are different. The summer show tends to cast a lot of younger players, many of which still operate in circles, not unlike high school and college cliques.

That’s not to say that Survivor hasn’t had people like that compete on their show, but the format and individuals sought out by casting has evolved. It has been years since we’ve seen onscreen bullying to the level that Big Brother 21 produced on Wednesday night’s Veto episode, where the groupthink came to the forefront and behaviors long known on the live feeds became evident to all.

To summarize the leadup until now, an eight-person alliance called Gr8ful (yikes) has held a stranglehold on the season due to an Edge of Extinction-like twist called Camp Comeback. The first four players evicted from the house will have the chance to come back into the game after the fourth eviction, all while staying in the house as social-only players who can’t compete or attend major meetings.

Nicole, a meager, quiet, nerdy archetype, had been playing a great under-the-radar game up until a player named Nick won Head of Household. The information she accrued allowed her to keep up with the season’s dynamics, and with nominations coming and her possibly going on the block, she revealed that the major alliance both Nick and his showmance partner are in were targeting them (the truth).

Nicole’s mistake was trusting a player who shares literally every piece of game info to everyone, no matter what. What resulted was Nick and Bella, his showmance partner, gathering up a nine-person alliance in a 16-person household, openly ranting and raving about Nicole, who was thrown under the bus by the alliance by pinning their lies on her. Nick and Bella had been played.

What followed was downright hard to watch. Nicole came up to talk to the group of nine who told her to leave the room while another player entering shut the door in her face. She was later approached by the player she was trying to save, with Bella calling her obnoxious, talking over her points and effectively ranting before Nicole could even explain herself, leaving the room and refusing to hear her out.

Later, both Jack and Christie were aggressively passive-aggressive with David, a voted-out player asking what happened, by saying he’s been perfect because he’s been keeping his mouth shut. This was in response to Ovi, another voted-out player, coming to Nicole’s defense against the group of nine as they hooted and hollered, calling her names in the privacy of their room.

It may seem timid upon the description, but this moment in Big Brother 21 is a concentrated taste of a mob mentality taking over from the beginning. From the beginning, the cool kids huddled up together to isolate the “others,” using racially coded terms to describe the players of color, ostracizing people for their bodies and pinning people’s aggressive behavior against others.

It’s not like Survivor is a stranger to this kind of behavior. Scot Pollard and, to a lesser extent, Jason from Kaoh Rong exhibited antagonistic behavior against others, even to an alliance member in Tai. We’ve also seen individual efforts against others across the years, with Ben Browning bullying through racism in Survivor Samoa, Jeff Varner using transphobia as “gameplay” in Game Changers and Rocky against Anthony in Fiji.

In fact, the early 20s is where we saw the mob mentality and outright bully tactics best on display (in a variety of ways) through some of the show’s worst seasons. Redemption Island produced the more implicit variety, with Boston Rob enforcing a buddy system completely ostracizing the competing tribe at the merge. His cult-like management style was remarkable gameplay, but the methods to ensure victory came at the result of dehumanizing people as lessers-than.

The explicit form came through in One World, with Colton Cumbie (the Republican who famously decried handouts) going power-hungry after receiving an idol handout from Sabrina. Once a self-perceived outcast on his own tribe, he ruled the swapped tribe like a petulant child.

He openly taunted Christina by telling her to kill herself and calling African-American Bill Posley “ghetto trash.” Alicia beside him was no saint, either, demeaning people by using words meant to attack students in her special education teaching. While neither won the game, their attitudes went virtually unchecked.

Despite the Ben Brownings, Coltons, Alicias and others of that era, Survivor has far pushed past casting individuals who exhibit bullying behavior as aggressive as we saw in Big Brother 21. Sure, there are disagreements and groups close to each other in every season going forward, but Big Brother has always been this.

From majority alliances that drop homophobic and racist slurs in BB15 to a large group of mindless drones and one mastermind targeting a military veteran by trying to trigger his PTSD and doubting his military service in BB19, debauchery, aggression and all forms of bullying has been used by players in powering targeting those without in Big Brother. Thank god Survivor has moved on from bringing on those kinds of people en masse.