‘Big Brother’ Showrunner Looks Ahead To Next Summer’s Season 19
Big Brother: Over the Top is about to wrap up, culminating what has been “the longest summer ever” for producers of the CBS reality show. With BBOTT premiering on the heels of the 18th summertime season of Big Brother, longtime showrunner Allison Grodner says she is ready for a break, albeit a short one.
In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Grodner said producers for the long-running reality show will break for the holidays before diving into the next season, which will debut next summer on CBS.
“It’s always fun when we get started again to talk about how we reinvent things, how we twist things up, what the new house will look like, what the new cast will look like,” Allison told THR. “It’s fun once we put a season to bed to take the break, recharge and get excited about the next one. I will be come January.”
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While Big Brother: OTT fans saw every move the players made — every competition played out for viewers live and there were no “fish tank” shots on the live feeds during the competitions— the CBS showrunner revealed that the feeds for the network version of the show will remain the way they always have because the competitions are much bigger and downtime is needed during the setup.
“You see the difference between the competitions that are done on BBOTT versus Big Brother’s summer version,” Grodner explained. “Those are complete and total yard transformations. They’re much more complex, big builds. They require a lot of time and time behind the scenes to make them work…So no, we don’t see changing that for the summer season. It’s just not possible. They really are different beasts. ”
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Allison also revealed that producers may try to enforce a “no napping” rule in future seasons of the show in an effort to give live feed watchers more for bang for their buck.
“This was an experiment for that,” she said of BBOTT.
“We’d like to see if there’s a way of implementing it [in the summer]. It’s a tough one and I think they embraced it and followed it for the majority of the season. As you can see towards the end people start to get a little stir crazy and escape by sleeping. That’s what happens to people in captivity. It’s hard to enforce it all the way to the end. We’re going to assess and take a look at it. It was a good rule.”
Grodner also dished on tweaks for future seasons of the show, including America’s involvement in voting, which dominated Big Brother: Over the Top.
“Fans want more involvement,” Allison said. “It was an interesting experiment to see, well, how much is too much?…Do we think we might change things up and tweak it a little bit here and there? Of course. We’re always doing that with this show whether it’s the summer program or whether we’ll be able to do this again. We learn every season.”
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Big Brother first premiered on CBS in the summer of 2000 and the show recently got picked up for Seasons 19 and 20, according to Entertainment Weekly. The upcoming Big Brother seasons will air in the summers of 2017 and 2018, respectively, and many fans are hoping for a long-overdue All-Stars season. There is no word if Big Brother: Over the Top will return for another online installment, but longtime host Julie Chen said the CBS All Access version of the show is “special.”
“America got to nominate someone every week for eviction … and ultimately America will pick who they want to see be the winner of ‘Big Brother,” Chen said.
Big Brother: Over the Top will crown its first winner On Dec. 1 during a live episode on CBS All Access. Houseguests Morgan, Jason or Kryssie will be take home the $250,000 Big Brother prize.
[Featured Image by Michael Loccisano/Getty Images]
