Big Brother in 2020 is as relevant as the abacus

It’s been 19 years since Big Brother first burst onto Australian screens. Back then, it was novel and compulsive. But now?

When Big Brother Australia debuted in 2001, it was intriguing and compulsive, and many of us found ourselves sucked into the wormhole of watching a group of randoms doing nothing all day.

At the time, reality TV was still in its nascent days. TV viewers had been gorging on Survivor and before that, the early adopters were all over Sylvania Waters and The Real World.

It was still months before The Amazing Race, two years before Paris Hilton introduced the world to a female Kardashian and a decade before any housewives or MasterChefs demanded our attention.

So Big Brother was a novelty.

A TV show in which 14 strangers agree to share a house equipped with dozens of cameras filming their every move let us all indulge in those voyeuristic urges we suppress.

To be honest, what we watched wasn’t that groundbreaking. There were some gasps over dancing doonas between Christina and Pete, Sara-Marie introduced Australia to the bunny bum dance and everyone thought Blair was cute so he ended up with a short stint on Neighbours.

But the concept, adapted from the original Dutch series, was fresh. Never before had we really been granted access to people’s mundane activities and thoughts so comprehensively.

Fast foward to now and all there is are people’s mundane thoughts being posted everywhere.

Big Brother: Class of 2001

There are more learned minds who could theorise on what it says about TV audiences who hungrily devoured these scenes of banality every night, becoming so invested as to spend money to vote people off.

The interactivity of the voting process, giving the controls to the audience to influence what happens next, became a game of seduction as the housemates realised they had to win our love to get closer to the $250,000 prize money – we went mad with power.

But what the hell is Big Brother supposed to be in 2020?

It’s a show that’s been cancelled twice previously thanks to declining ratings and an ageing format.

What Channel 7 seems to have missed is that Big Brother in 2020 is as culturally relevant as the abacus or the scroll. Everything that made the show distinct has been overtaken in the past near-two decades.

The show takes its title from George Orwell’s dystopian vision of a world in which governments tracked our every move through surveillance, but now, 19 years later, while Orwell’s vision is still relevant and pernicious, the show has nothing to say in a world where we have all voluntarily adopted those technologies.

Why does Big Brother still exist when every person with a phone camera or webcam can broadcast themselves live every hour of every day on a gazillion online platforms including Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, YouTube or more?

Why does Big Brother still exist when you can trade in your dignity and privacy for a slice of fame and fortune on your own terms from your own bedroom, and not have to rely on a production company giving you a “good edit”?

Sonia Kruger hosts Big Brother for the second revival

There are really two types of reality TV shows now. There are the talent-based or aspirational formats such as MasterChef, The Voice or Queer Eye. And then there are the ones that rely on scandal, in which you cast volatile personalities and hope they claw at each other and prove that humanity is lost.

Big Brother 2020 probably falls into that latter camp but lacks the high-stakes environment to properly ferment that resentment.

You could argue greed and $250,000 was reason enough, but you can’t scheme 24 hours a day for weeks and weeks – mostly you’re going to sit around, be bored and moan about not having tea.

Which makes for really boring TV – and we can find boring elsewhere, on our phones.

The ratings may be decent in this first week (which is truly baffling), but don’t expect that to last.

This watered-down version of Big Brother isn’t even live, filmed months in advance and has no spectacle or scale, to the point that one eliminated contestant thought his exit was a fake-out given the total lack of fanfare. And that audience interactivity has been reduced to one public vote at the very end.

Perhaps the producers figured there’s no need for audiences to vent through voting because the toxicity of instant social media reactions can fill that void.

Why spend 55c voting someone off when you can exorcise your disproportionate hate by trolling the contestants on Twitter instead? That’s what we do now, right?

So, I ask again, what is the point of Big Brother 2020?

There’s no novelty, no fireworks and very little entertainment value. Unlike that first series, in 19 years’ time, we won’t remember the names of any of the 2020 class.