Back to 'Big Brother' House

For all its fanciful interior décor, the Big Brother house looks like a terrible place to be locked in for two and half months. The entrance to Studio 18 on CBS’ Radford lot has the ambience of a medium security facility, with a guard at a desk at the door checking IDs.

When 20 journalists came to visit Saturday as part of the TV Critics press tour, the names were checked and double checked as if we were prison visitors.

Inside, the place is such a mess, with dishes overflowing in the sink, piles of dirty clothes at the foot of every bed, it’s like a summer share from hell.

And lined with lights throughout, it’s an uncommonly bright place for a place where the windows are all two-way mirrors – 119 of them.

Behind those mirrors, cameramen slide their equipment on well-worn tracks along a track that lines the house – an unholy corridor of voyeurism called the Camera Cross for the shape it makes.

Reporters, ordered to wear dark clothes (or provided jackets if they forgot), went from the blinding sun in the smaller-than-it-looks backyard with its bad fake grass and teeny pools into the catacombs of the camera halls hugging each room – blackness cut only by dayglow arrows on the floor.

Still, cameramen in their hoodies seem to mysteriously appear in the murk; a couple of times the cords trailing them wrapped against the legs of the visitors.

It’s dead creepy to peek into the windows of a place where a dozen people live.

“It’s what we affectionally call the Human Zoo,” says producer Allison Grodner, conducting the tour. “It Truly is a a voyeuristic experience.”

And is it is for millions who tune in every week in the three weekly broadcasts, nightly three hour live feeds and, for the truly obsessed, the 24 hour feed available through computer subscription taking the feed from 52 cameras and 95 microphones.

“Big Brother” is a big, big broadcast, producing 30 primetime hours each summer. And though it doesn’t have the celebrity and sleaze of the shorter British version, it’s become a summer tradition on otherwise largely scripted CBS. Now in its 12^th year, more than 250 work on the production, but all of them stay strictly out of view of the housemates.

Part of the game is to have them deal exclusively with one another. And cut off from the outside world, they can only deal with one another. , whose fate is to be caught up only in the faces of their fellow housemates.

There’s little diversion there – no TV, no music, no books, no paper, no pencil. That’s why they always seem to be slouching around obsessing on alliances, conspiracies and gameplay strategy.

Grodner calls it a “heightened sociological and psychological experiment” and “High school times 1,000. You regress. And your own personality gets exaggerated under stress.”

A few housemates have found a way to kill time and pressure by coupling up (and yet even that activity is under scrutiny of the ultraviolet night vision cameras.

The couple at the central of the season are Rachel and Brandon. They both come from a science field, though Rachel seems to play up more her showgirl background. She’s been Head of Household twice and a prime target for elimination otherwise. In the broadcast Sunday, she put up Hayden and Kristen – the other couple in the show, who only got revealed publically in Sunday’s episode, where Kristen and Rachel fought as bitter enemies.

But they work ahead on this show, and Saturday’s visit was the occasion of the Power of Veto competition – a big “Pinball Wizard” theme in the backyard where the players wore wizard costumes.

It will probably look like a lively competition on TV Wednesday, but playing it out Saturday seemed a dour and dull way to sit in the afternoon sun for the houseguests, who sometimes seemed to glance directly at the secret visitors behind the glass (but they were more likely glancing at their own reflections).

New twists are coming to the show this week, with a new “Saboteur” elected by viewers going to work on Thursday for a couple of weeks. The original saboteur, expected to be a season-long twist, was thwarted when she was voted out for other reasons the very first week. “We didn’t expect that,” Grodner said.

The tour climaxed with an opportunity to try some “slop,” the concoction that “Have Nots” are forced to eat for a week if they lose competitions. I can report that it’s a bland, chalky version of oatmeal with a bad aftertaste, but houseguests can sometimes perk it up with honey.

“Big Brother” perks up, too, with editing and music added in a 2 ½ day turnaround where most reality show hours take six to nine weeks to edit. The gloss and sometimes even glamour, seems to be added in the TV mix a well. Because walking around the messy frat house, lit like a Costco, didn’t seem glamorous at all.

I was tempted to leave a mysterious message for houseguests to discover later, but that might throw the whole competition.

“Big Brother 12” airs Sunday, Wednesday and Thursday at 8 p.m. on CBS. “Big Brother After Dark,” a live feed, runs daily on Showtime 2 from midnight to 3 a.m.