On Aug. 27, "Big Brother" will air its 1,000th episode, becoming the first primetime show to do so. This week, “Big Brother” will make history by being the first primetime show to hit 1,000 episodes. And in true “Big Brother” fashion, the show is celebrating that milestone with a twisty, one-of-a-kind 90-minute episode that will air Thursday, Aug. 27.
The popular reality program that airs three times a week on CBS is a one-of-a-kind social experiment where 16 strangers are locked in a house together for the summer. Each week, the houseguests compete for power and vote each other off. The catch is that not only are the houseguests completely cut off from the outside world, but everything they say and do is broadcast on the 24/7 live feeds.
Julie Chen Moonves has been hosting the show since Season 1, which was a very different game back in 2000. Famously, the first season (which was run by the creators of the original Netherlands version) struggled with ratings. As rumors spread that the show would get canceled mid-season, so did criticism of Chen Moonves as a host.
He went to the press saying that CBS News should immediately fire me. In his opinion, I was single-handedly blurring the lines between news and entertainment.” It wasn’t until Season 2 that the show took a page from the “Survivor” playbook by introducing more strategic elements, like the Head of Household competition, which determines who holds the power each week. The houseguests also started voting each other off that season.
Those changes resulted in a more cutthroat “Big Brother,” causing a spike in the show’s popularity. She continues: “Since we took off in Season 2, we’ve done well in the ratings, but it didn’t always guarantee that we were coming back the next year. Every single year in those first, maybe 10 to 15 seasons, at the end of the summer we’d go, ‘Are we coming back?’” Inside the CBS reality umbrella, it was about finding how to differentiate the show from “Survivor” and “The Amazing Race,” which all launched in the early 2000s as part of the craze that erupted from MTV’s “The Real World.” “We play in the comedy space, we play in the romance space.
Obviously, the strategy and game are at the forefront, but there’s these other worlds we’re able to play in,” Meehan says. The Power of Veto, introduced in Season 3, crucially gives nominees the chance to save themselves from the block before eviction night. But it wasn’t until Season 26 when the latest format change, the BB Blockbuster (then coined the A.I.
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