Based upon the Orwellian concept of a group of people subject to an all-seeing, all-knowing, and all-controlling power (in this case, the producers) the premise is simple. Select ten participants who agree to be isolated together as a group in a fabricated “house” lined with not-so-hidden television cameras rolling around the clock for 12 weeks. Deprive them of contact with the outside world, and create opportunities for them to bond—or not—as they form a community. Present them with tasks and challenges that will either encourage teamwork or create competition. Create a way for contestants (euphemistically called “house-guests”) to nominate their peers for “banishment,” but in which the viewing audience actually gets the final vote as to which contestant is removed each week. Al-ow a special room in which the contestants can talk “privately” to the cameras and the producers to express their “feelings, frustrations, thoughts and nominations,” all the while being filmed. Broadcast highlights from the daily lives and mundane interactions of the contestants on television in prime time multiple nights of the week, while also creating a website with live streaming video feed from multiple cameras that interested fans can access 24 hours a day. Each week, have a studio-based show in which the “host” of the program talks to the contestants, announces who has been voted off, and then removes the banished contestant and interviews him or her as well as family and friends of the contestants in front of a studio audience. In this way, the number of contestants is slowly whittled down to the winner of the sizeable grand prize (250,000 Dutch guilders in the original version; $500,000 in the first U.S. version, broadcast on CBS television network in the summer of 2000).

The first attempts at the Endemol reality formula in Europe were received with phenomenal popular success, both economically and in terms of stirring up a public discourse about cultural values, ethics, privacy, and the human condition. The popular press covered the “new reality TV” extensively, focusing on its potential to radically change the notion of television in our society. As they had in Europe, the upcoming U.S. adaptations of the reality television formulas in the summer of 2000 (notably Survivor and Big Brother) received extraordinarily heavy promotion.

The narrative “action” and interpersonal drama that take place in the Big Brother house are supposed to be naturally occurring, although the producers affect the drama through their casting of the “characters” and their structuring of the daily activities of the house-guests around a series of programmed tasks (“challenges”). A high degree of self-consciousness also curtails the spontaneity of the contestants’ behavior, owing to their knowledge that everything they do or say is subject to national broadcast via web feed or television. On the viewing end, the experience is one that Maclean’s contributor Robert Sheppard calls “orchestrated voyeurism.”

The first U.S. version of Endemol Production Company’s Big Brother was broadcast on CBS television with concurrent live online feeds in partnership with America Online (AOL). Unlike its European predecessors, it was described as a “ratings disappointment” for CBS despite its fairly consistent weekly placement in the Nielsen top 20; however, the most notable aspect of the Big Brother phenomenon was its remarkable crossover Internet presence and the strong and loyal online audience it created and maintained. It gained acclaim as an unprecedented, momentous hit on the Internet. America Online, which partnered with CBS and Endemol to provide the streaming web feed of the voyeuristic cameras, as well as setting up the program’s official website, boasted about the overwhelming success of the online ratings. In fact, this became the most remarkable aspect of the entire U.S. Big Brother venture. Journalist David Kronke reported that Big Brother “has changed the way television and new media can interact,” while popular culture scholar Robert Thompson was quoted as saying that, because of this unprecedented convergence, “When the final history of TV is written, Big Brother will be considered more important than the better and more highly rated Survivor.” News reports indicated that the AOL-sponsored site was the most visited new Internet site in July of 2000, the month the program premiered, with more than 4.2 million visitors. AOL’s publicity articles touted the “unprecedented convergence between television and the Internet” achieved by the CBS-AOL Big Brother alliance as the “largest ongoing webcast in history,” and claimed a “tenfold increase in participants [of] the streaming webcast during peak usage time in the first week.”

Big Brother broke new ground in establishing a multiplicity of ways that a television program could reach its audience. In fact, one could argue that what we call Big Brother actually consists of several different programs, several distinct audiences, and multiple versions of its narrative. The Big Brother production, in its multimedia entirety, provides opportunities for viewers to engage with the narrative situation engendered by the program’s premise in a variety of ways: all mediated, but to varying degrees and through different media discourses and structures. Moreover, the complexity of the phenomenon makes it difficult to even find the language to talk about it. Is it a television “show,” a webcast, a form of performance art, a cultural phenomenon, an unfolding news event? In many important ways, it is all of these—and that will, ultimately, be Big Brother’s lasting contribution to television history.