Reality Matters_ 19 Writers Come Clean About the Shows We Can't Stop Watching - Anna David [33]
Yes, that’s what I tell people, mostly because it makes me sound vaguely academic; it also happens to be true. But the real reason I tune in is for the fighting. And the meltdowns. And the hookups. The show is a pressure cooker for the contestants, and watching people’s mental states slowly deteriorate is part of what makes this show so grippingly fantastic. Plus, unlike other major reality franchises, Big Brother airs three nights a week—and that’s on network TV alone. Subscribers to Showtime get the seductively named Big Brother: After Dark, which airs three hours of live footage from within the house every single night of the week for three months straight. Throw in live Internet feeds that run 24/7, and viewers have a near constant supply of bickering, screwing, and gossip. You barely have an opportunity to get away from it.
After spending nearly all of my summers of the new millennium obsessing over Big Brother, I figured I’d earned the right to show up for a taping or two (or six, as it were) now that CBS was allowing a live studio audience during the “eviction” episodes. Of course, this meant having to mix and mingle with a variety of strange people from all walks of life, which was tremendously disconcerting for me. Living in Los Angeles—an epicenter of pop culture, style, and celebrity mania—it’s all about who you know, which stars you can name drop, and what crowds you can align yourself with, and loitering around with Middle America was certainly not boosting my precious cool cred, thank you very much. Nevertheless, I attempted to curb my urbane contempt. As I arrived at CBS for my fourth taping, however, I discovered that my threshold for egregious behavior was much lower than I had ever expected.
The bane of my existence that day was one loud audience member, whom I called Shelly. I didn’t actually know her real name, but she just seemed like a Shelly (apologies in advance to other Shellys of the world). She was, to put it mildly, awful. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen her. No, I’d had the privilege of sitting behind Shelly at my second taping, which meant I had already been privy to her awfulness.
Shelly’s major problem was that she thought she was the star of Big Brother—or the star of, well, anything. She was one of those tragic attention-seekers who seemed to feel that if she were just wacky enough, maybe a casting director would pluck her from the audience and place her on TV. As a result, she spent much of that first taping being loud and cracking dumb jokes, which would have been fine if she’d been (a.) funny, (b.) interesting, or (c.) a few decibels quieter. Instead, her jokes were lame, her comments inane, and her voice booming. Every time she opened her mouth, all the people in my section shared disbelieving looks, as if to say, “Can one person be this awful?” Part of me hoped some sort of mob rule would take over the set, sending Shelly to the curb outside in a flurry of screams just shy of a Shirley Jackson stoning. Alas, the crowd never mobbed, so I had to contend with what I had: my furious eyes, which, tragically, went primarily unnoticed because I was sitting behind her.
And things went from bad to worse. In the middle of the live show, Shelly let out a very loud, very audible “Whoo hooo!” despite the fact that we’d been told explicitly, several times, to be quiet while the cameras were on.
Luckily, a stage manager reprimanded Shelly during the next commercial break—which, while wonderful,