Transcript

Big Brother Canada 1 is a season best described as…. comfortably experimental. In both ways. Neither the audience nor the houseguests competing knew what to expect from this season, what format was it going to take? Is it going to have a popular vote like in the UK version, is it going to have a weird format like many international ones, or will it stick to the strategy-centered game of the United States? Well, thankfully, it is based on the more interesting US format, and we have all those great competitions with the HoH, the Golden Power of Veto and lots and lots of alliances going against each other, just how I like it.

But here I also like the amateurish feeling of the show. It was the first try at a Canadian BB, no one knew how to go about the season.When I say it feels experimental, I mean it feels like almost everyone is trying to figure things out as they go, since most of them hadn’t watched Big Brother before (except for a couple of superfans in the cast), and still then no one was sure about what things the show was going to do different here. It’s also fun watching the host, Arisa Cox, have to wing it through certain portions of the game and getting used to hosting it,. There are a couple of shocking, unprecedented moments this season and it’s hilarious watching Arisa Cox not being sure of what to do. Yeah, we’ll get to that. That said, I think she does a great job, and she only gets better from here on out.

With the timidness of both the players and the host, this season feels refreshingly relaxed, but, this is important, it also doesn’t feel outdated. It isn’t like the old school era where the game felt more rigid and slow, though being fair it also can’t reach the level of “realness” that those older seasons displayed. Even from the beginning I think the game flows really well, the first half of the game has many distinguishable characters, alliances making deals left and right, and fun downfalls almost every week, although there’s a personality that brings the mood down at many points. Everyone’s having fun and then they come in and act like a jerk and start fighting.. there are many points in which the conflicts get really personal and all of it orbits around this player. They do get some moments of humanity here and there, but I definitely cheered for his downfall. Still, it was nice having a season that felt more real and not too over-the-top

And it’s funny that I say that, because there are some definitely over-the-top personalities in this cast. To me, it’s important for the first season of any reality show to have a memorable cast to survive, and Big Brother Canada achieves this by its cast being pretty weird. And I don’t mean weird as in “haha they’re funny weird!”, no,some are really, really strange personalities. There’s someone who should be like a normal dad but instead they talk in third person and is like a cartoon character living in his own little world, there’s a deadly serious dude who calls himself the Emperor of Doom, a girl that appears dumb, loud, and clueless but you’re never sure if she’s playing that up, she never breaks the act but there are moments where you can tell she’s aware of it being a role, and there’s also like,,the ultimate deconstruction of every superfan nerd archetype we see on reality shows and everything about his personality in the house was fiction written by him, and then, there’s Gary Glitter.

If the show wanted to really make its first season stand out, Gary was the perfect casting choice. SO over the top, so eccentric, so fun to watch, and so funny to watch them meltdown over every little thing. The funniest moment this season is when Gary's told they’re going to be on slop and they run off crying inconsolably, it’s so comical. Gary carries this season when it comes to entertainment, and if you’re someone who thinks like “Oh they look so annoying” Don’t worry, they’re really not,, the show does a good job balancing the airtime between players but algo giving them humanizing moments to make them relatable, so a lot of players do get their time to tell their story.

And not only are the characters strange, but the relationships are also weird. One funny thing about this season is how much of it plays out in pairs, almost every houseguest somehow ended up with a ride-or-die, so the game ends up with many pairs linking together or then breaking off to find a new pair to link up to and move forward, and when someone is left alone, they just find a new person to pair up with. I think that’s a pretty fun peculiarity that distinguishes this season.

Though, for all the fascinating characters that it has, it’s so annoying that they all end up giving their games up to the two most vanilla personalities of the cast. There’s a big showmance this season and I really couldn’t care less about it, and the fact that they dominate the competitions in the second half make it feel like it really drags. I do give props to one of them because they were clearly the best player of the season, but god damn did the other annoy me to no end. She gets so many lucky breaks,, she breaks so many promises and it feels like she should have a juicy downfall but that never comes because either her or her showmance keep winning all the competitions and ugh, that’s just so frustrating. I do appreciate having this ultimate villain to root against that kept me watching through the rest of the season, but ultimately her not getting a comeuppance of some sort feels unsatisfying.

Also, the twists, that’s another complaint. It’s the first season, they don't know what feels unfair and what doesn't, but the twists here feel poorly thought out. I mean, one of them screwed a player so badly that it became a verb and the other one was just flat out unfair. Bringing back a previously eliminated contestant is already shaky, but doing so at the FINAL 5? Where the game is in its most delicate stage? Come on, that definitely screwed some good players over. But it also made the final 2 feel like a lose-lose situation where, no matter who won, it wasn’t going to feel right. I liked one of them but they shouldn’t have been in the final, and the other one I was MAD made it to the end. So. I lose.

But if we’re talking about the finale, Oh, My. God. I said that it was important for the first season to have a memorable cast, but I think it’s also imperative to have a shocking moment to keep people talking. And damn if this isn’t THE shocking moment of Big Brother Canada. One of the most shocking in the Big Brother franchise in GENERAL, I don’t think it had ever happened before and it hasn’t happened since. If you care about results spoilers please look away or skip to this timeframe. I’ll give you 5 seconds. 1,2,3,4,5. Okay.

Basically, the winner wins by accident. Someone accidentally votes for the wrong person to win, and it turns out that their vote was the deciding vote to break the tie, meaning, the winner shouldn’t even have won! But if the other person won, it still wouldn’t have felt right because they were the ones saved by the Final 5 twist! So, it’s like destiny knew that the other person had actually played the better game. What makes it more shocking is that the person who voted wrong was the BEST friend of the losing finalist! they were so tight the whole game, and even that person goes up to vote and says “My vote is 100% secure”, so when their vote comes out and it reads the name of the opposite finalist, everyone is like “What the fuck just happened?” The voter is confused as all hell, Arisa doesn’t know what to do, they even pause the segment to check the cameras and see if anything weird happens, but, no, they had just grabbed the wrong key when they cast their vote! That is unbelievable!

And it makes it so the winner doesn’t get the satisfying comeuppance they should’ve had for screwing all these people over, instead, they’re saved from having a downfall by the biggest lucky break of all time and the win the whole thing, but then again they really were the more deserving winner out of the two finalists, so I can’t even feel like the other finalist was robbed. What a truly bizarre ending. Though I do find it really funny that Topaz’s name gained two different meanings in one season.

So that was Canada’s big first try at Big Brother… I’ve seen some people say that to get into BBCAN, you should skip over Big Brother Canada 1, and I just don’t get it. BBCAN1 is a great season, and a great way to introduce anyone to Big Brother. It's fun, it’s fluid, its characters are pretty strange but interesting, but it’s also not too fast to keep up with. It’s a comfortable first introduction to a “good” season of Big Brother if anyone wants to try it. The twists are a little too pervasive, the endgame drags thanks to bad competition results, but it’s all worth it due to that unmissable, shocking ending. Even if I don’t like the winner that much. If you’re unsure if you should start here, I say this is a beginning point that settles expectations just right. Not too high, not too low, it’s perfectly enjoyable. Now all that’s left is to see if this momentum continues into Big Brother Canada 2.