CBS’ “Big Brother” Makes History With First All-Black Alliance
By: Joe Shetina
Tags: Pop Culture, Reality TV, Culture, Big Brother, TV

Never mind that several white contestants on the show have made several insensitive, if not downright disgusting comments about minorities in the past.

Never mind that the casting of one, maybe two, and rarely three black contestants on a season of Big Brother opened up wide gulfs of communication, made them vulnerable to microaggressions, and cut those contestants’ chances of winning considerably.

Across its 22 previous seasons, Big Brother has been won by 14 white men. Three winners have been people of color: Season 19’s Josh Martinez, Season 20’s Kaycee Clark, and Season 4’s iconic Jun Song. However, none of these winners have been African-American.

The current season, Big Brother 23, is the first to benefit from CBS’ diversity and inclusion initiative mandating that its reality shows cast at least 50% people of color per season. The season featured the first US Big Brother cast (outside of the Celebrity Big Brother spin-off) with more than three black contestants in the house at once.

Even before its embattled 15th season, which saw several contestants’ in-game behavior having a real-life impact on their careers and public image, Big Brother was a magnet for controversy. The show’s premise, which throws together several strangers in a house outfitted for round-the-clock Internet surveillance, was bound to highlight some of the darker sides of human interaction. The things these people say and do in private were suddenly being broadcast to millions, and with the live feed component, no editing team could protect them.

The cast of Big Brother 15.

At least, not from the live feed viewers. The main show is another story entirely.

What we know as reality TV seems to have been built on this kind of raw, unfiltered social interaction. Racism, sexism, homophobia were just part and parcel of this form of entertainment. Look at an early season of The Real World if you want proof.

I say all this as a lover of reality TV, specifically reality competition series. I watched the oddball survivalists and cunning strategists navigate the hokey, colonialist framework of Survivor as a six-year-old. I suffered through the cruelty of bad auditions and the indignity of watching my favorites almost always lose on American Idol. I came shockingly late to Top Model and saw Tyra Banks put these girls in blackface and brownface for a photoshoot and felt like I’d astral projected back to the early 2000s.

The Cookout Alliance represents not just a sea change for Big Brother but it is representative of the change in the ethos of reality TV since those early days. The company line on these shows was that they were first and foremost “social experiments for television.” These shows relied upon throwing together diametrically opposed worldviews, banking on the (mostly nonprofessional participants) butting heads, and showcasing the worst of themselves for the TV audience.

Less charitable to its participants were competitions like America’s Next Top Model, Bad Girls Club, Flavor of Love, and The Bachelor. These shows put their contestants through the wringer ostensibly to find true love or to be discovered as the new supermodel or, sometimes, to let them go wild on national TV.

A two-season Fox show called The Swan went even further. The premise found doctors and therapists guiding women deemed “ugly ducklings” to undergo transformations and makeovers — including plastic surgery.

The most memorable scenes are almost always scenes of heightened conflict. Also, this conflict was generally drawn from women fighting one another or even fighting their own bodies.

Born from the social experiment ethos of early reality TV, shows like Intervention, Hoarders, and My Strange Obsession began to take on a more “psychological” but nonetheless troublesome and exploitative angle. Featuring people in dire circumstances, buckling under the weight of addiction and pathological behaviors while the show’s “experts” probed and baited them, the overwhelming narrative drive of these shows was sensationalism.

In the last few years, though, I’ve watched competition reality television change. Spurred on by the popularity of feel-good shows like The Great British Bake Off and the increasing use of social media to engage and/or harass reality show contestants, the tone of these shows has changed considerably over the past few years.

I’ve watched RuPaul turn a tongue-in-cheek Top Model parody/knock-off into an international franchise with an increasingly earnest self-help throughline. Survivor has been forced into a reckoning with its misogynistic treatment of female players and the sporadic, but intensely upsetting moments of sexual harassment throughout the show’s history. More exploitative reality shows of the Aughts have been phased out completely or retooled for the current climate of a kinder, gentler reality TV. Between the sixth and seventh seasons of Hoarders, the show was rebooted to focus on a more compassionate approach, less dependent on rubbernecking and sensational approaches to mental illness and addiction. Instead of The Swan, we have shows like Skin Decision, which follows patients who elect to have reconstructive plastic surgery. The driving force of these stories is more holistic, based more in quality of life considerations than the pursuit of impossible beauty standards — although the show isn’t wholly divorced from the body shame born from those standards.

These tonal changes toward kindness seem to coincide with diversity and inclusion investments in television as a whole. Although, unsurprisingly, CBS seemed to be the last to embrace them.

Big Brother, in particular, felt like the last of the longstanding competition shows to come around to this change. It’s hard to reform a show under a huge banner like CBS (which is, arguably, home to the most conservative primetime lineup of the big networks) that has trafficked in terrible behavior for so long.

For too long, black Big Brother contestants have been affected by racism and aggressive behavior from white houseguests. To address it was often to derail their own chances at winning.

Da’Vonne Rogers: “She’s talking to me like I’m her child and if I respond to that *I’m* gonna look crazy.”

I understand people who genuinely disliked that this season was less contentious than previous ones, but it’s not the first time a steamroll has occurred. It’s probably the most decisive steamroll in a long time, and one that may never happen again, but it’s not totally unprecedented on a strategic level.

One thing you cannot say about the majority of the Cookout is that they didn’t come to play. And even so, every alliance in every season has people who do the heavier lifting. If you like clean strategy, it doesn’t get better than the Cookout. Personally, someone who loves messy drama, we’ve still got weeks left and we get to watch this alliance now go at one another after a season of maneuvering and festering resentment.

The conundrum reality TV shows now face is that, even when they strive to be better and kinder to their participants who are — largely — nonprofessional performers, there is still an undercurrent of individualism and competition. How do we be kinder in reality TV when the whole enterprise is, largely, unkind? Almost all of the competition reality shows I’ve cited are exactly that: competition. It’s exciting to watch these people outsmart each other. It’s not fun to watch the very real — and usually completely disproportionate — harassment many of them face or the burdens they must carry into the game with them.

The Cookout Alliance celebrate their triumph.

The Cookout Alliance was a pact formed because of its greater political and social implications. Until now, the six have made moves for the good of the group. Even when they flirted with betraying one another or cracks began to show in their trust, it was the mission that kept them together. It’s incredible, selfless, and tremendously unfair. It makes me wonder how great of a player any of the six could be if they didn’t have to worry about making history — or if that even matters.

I hope that if the Cookout has done anything to affect the future of the series, it’s leveled the playing field for the next time we see this many contestants of color on Big Brother. Hopefully, they can play the way their white counterparts have been able to play from the beginning: for themselves.