After weeks of domination, it looked like Vanessa was destined to pull off the “Big Brother 17″ win on Wednesday night. Instead, Steve was crowned the season’s final Head of Household and he evicted the savvy poker player, ensuring his 6-3 win.
Steve’s triumph capped off what some fans saw as the best “Big Brother” season in recent years and what CBS president Les Moonves said “wasn’t a great year for casting” on the summer reality fixture. During the 90-minute finale, Vanessa won the first round of the three-part HoH contest after promising to take Liz to the Final 2. But Steve won the second round, scaling a wall to complete a “Big Brother”-themed crossword puzzle. That pitted Steve and Vanessa against each other in the annual “complete the juror’s quote” balance-beam competition, and Steve pulled off a narrow victory before giving an emotional speech during which he praised Vanessa’s gameplay and said it was in his best interest to compete against Liz in the finals. (He was right: Vanessa, Julia and Austin were the only three who voted against him.) Steve is now $500,000 richer, and Liz is walking away with the $50,000 runner-up check.
Outside of the infighting that was debated during the final jury deliberations, led by “Big Brother 2″ winner Dr. Will Kirby, America selected James, Johnny Mac and Jason as its three most cherished cast members, with James nabbing the $25,000 fan-favorite prize.
Especially compared to Season 16, this round of “Big Brother” featured more strategizing than some recent iterations have seen. But the show’s problems were glaring, and we have a few quick solutions for how CBS can improve on those when the series returns next summer, as Julie Chen implied it will during her signoff. Because what lies beneath the overproduced show is still a three-month-long bout of social manipulation and physical endurance — the cast members are just too self-aware to make that seem organic.
• Eliminate the battle-of-the-block twist, which, as Jason said in our oral history earlier this summer, “just makes these people put up these irrelevant targets.” It becomes a game of math, with players forming large alliances and voting in blocs because it’s all about getting the house to band together in pursuit of a single target. An HoH tends to make weak moves out of fear of being dethroned the next day. The same few pawns get put up each week (sorry, Johnny Mac) because the HoH is forced to rely on backdooring in order to ensure his or her target’s exit. And no one is bold enough to go against the person who supposedly holds the power. In other words, it’s boring.
• Introduce twists that force the houseguests to concoct fresh game moves. The flaw of “Big Brother” is that almost everyone cast on the show is four steps ahead of the producers — they know which competitions are on the horizon and how the math must shake out to get what they want. The twists, then, need to force the cast to navigate new strategies, not just endure a minor obstacle like season-long MVPs or playing in pairs. The “BB” takeover trope actually has great potential, if it weren’t randomly axed in the fourth week. There are ample ways to rattle the houseguests: How about three nominees sometime? How about uprooting the sole HoH’s authority right before the Power of Veto competition? Giving both nominees immunity right before a live eviction? Telling an HoH that he or she is not allowed to discuss who’s going up on the block that week? Longtime fans of the show often say they miss the early seasons, but that doesn’t mean they pine for “BB” in its purest form — they miss when the houseguests had to invent original ways to play the game. If the show wants to accomplish that again, we need to distract the all-too-self-aware people who sign up.
• Something about the diary-room sessions has to change. It’s become the show’s biggest weakness, whereas it used to be its strength. It wasn’t all that long ago that cast members sounded like something other than rehearsed robots. How many of them used trainwreck puns while describing Becky this season, for example? No group of people is that pseudo-witty. Season 18’s goal should be to cast folks who don’t require a third take to make their soundbites TV-friendly. Show houseguests thinking about their responses, make them seem three-dimensional again. It will make all their interactions outside of the diary room seem more organic. This season, Jason and Johnny Mac were the only two players whose diary rooms seemed consistently unscripted, and what do you know? They were two of America’s favorite players. The other favorite was the season’s chief prankster, James. Personality still wins, but sometimes it seems like the “Big Brother” producers have forgotten that.
What else do you think could be done to improve “Big Brother”? Tell us in the comments, and head here to read our oral history of the show.
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