Key Takeaways
- Big Brother features torturous challenges & punishments to entertain viewers and impact houseguest dynamics.
- The show’s iconic recurring competitions showcase different skills and are eagerly anticipated.
- Punishments like isolation, tethering, and BB Slop remain feared by houseguests for the physical and mental toll they impose.
CBS’s Big Brother is well known for shaking up each season of the reality show, keeping audiences going back for more. The reality tv show features twists that put the houseguests through torturous challenges and punishments in the name of entertainment. These twists often come at the expense of houseguests, who are put through in the hopes of winning immunity, impressing their fellow co-stars and winning prizes.
Over the years, Big Brother has introduced several recurring competitions that showcase different skills. Some popular recurring competitions include The Wall, OTEV, Slip and Slide, and BB Comics. Fans and houseguests look forward to these legendary competitions, even if they cause pain and conflict.
Houseguests look forward less to punishments, which occur when they break the Big Brother rules, lose a competition, or fail a task. The punishments over the years include dressing up in unflattering costumes, solitary confinement, and being tethered to another houseguest.
Big Brother Season 3 Introduced The First Torturous Competition
The 2002 edition of Big Brother saw Arnold Shapiro return to produce the series and claim that production would be much stricter on the houseguests. This series is when competition started to get more torturous and rules tighter, in the hopes of making “sociologically intriguing” television.
“I could say: ‘I’m going to be me. I’m going to be my ethical, honest, low-key self.’ But who knows, after six and seven weeks of having been betrayed by somebody and [having] plots hatched against me and being deprived of food except for peanut butter and jelly? I might become a villain.”
Allison Grodner also returned as the executive producer of the reality TV show and claimed the new twists and turns were “so that the people coming into the house who have worked out a perfect strategy—and believe me, all of them think they have—are in for a few surprises.”
In Season 3 of Big Brother, a new power was given to a houseguest. Each week, one houseguest was granted the power to save a nominee from eviction with the Silver Power of Veto. This forced the Head of Household to name a replacement nominee. During its first year of appearing on the show, Big Brother did not allow a nominated HouseGuest to use the Silver Power of Veto on themselves.
Big Brother
Season 3 introduced one of the series’ most torturous HOH endurance competitions in Week 6, called “Houseguest Soup.”
The remaining houseguests all sat together in a small tub filled with dirty water in the backyard. They could not stand, sleep or get out of the tub or else they were eliminated from the competition. The outgoing houseguest was tasked with dumping buckets full of even nastier items, such as dead squids into the pool. What made this competition even worse was that some of the houseguests claimed to urinate in the water while sitting in the tub with the others.
Big Brother 3 had a huge impact on the dynamics of the game and is considered one of the most influential seasons of the long-running competition show. The harder, tougher gameplay set the tone for the future of the show. Another hugely influential yet torturous element of BB3 was the sequestered jury, in which the last seven eliminated contestants are sequestered outside of the house until after the finale.
Lisa Donahue, the first female winner and former bartender, won the third series at the age of 26 and walked away with $500,000. She used her earnings to launch her career as a photographer.
This third season of
Big Brother
was also the first season to feature a theme for a twist when it introduced the “Expect the Unexpected” themed season.
Viewers Love The Endurance Comps, But They Subject Houseguests To Brutal Conditions
Endurance is a recurring Big Brother Head of Household competition in which the winners have the power to choose who to put on the block and up for elimination.
Early seasons of Big Brotherfeatured more endurance competitions than later seasons of the reality series. A popular endurance competition involves houseguests piling into a car, and the last one to stay inside wins. This endurance competition was less about brutality and more about discomfort and sacrificing socializing, eating, and sometimes sleeping.
As the show evolved, the endurance challenges became harder and harder. Most seasons of Big Brother feature a wall competition, which requires endurance to win. These brutal competitions have become increasingly difficult, tailored for smaller athletic people.
The longest endurance challenge in Big Brother history happened during Season 6 and lasted 14 hours. It was a simple challenge, which involved the houseguests having to hold a single button in an enclosed glass case without letting go. Once participants let go of the button, they had the option to choose to open a limited number of boxes.
Holding onto a button for fourteen hours while watching people win free subscriptions, tech, and even cold hard money. This challenge was only ever seen once on Big Brother.
Which Big Brother Punishments Have Been The Worst
Big Brother loves to reuse some classic punishments because they spark joy in viewers but inflict pain on houseguests.
In a bizarre twist on a reoccurring punishment, during BB20 houseguest Sam was forced to live in isolation and only speak to others through a robot. She had limited reactions and struggled to bond with others. This unique reaction significantly impacted her time on Big Brother, a show all about forming friendships and alliances.
Another popular solitary confinement moment is in season 15, when Judd was given 24 hours alone. The twist? The alarm in the room would go off every 10 minutes, no matter how much the houseguest pressed snooze.
One of Big Brother’s more physical punishments involves the houseguest forced to complete a series of tasks in the backyard within a certain time period. In Big Brother 26, houseguest Angela was forced to pick up 1,000 individual orbs – one by one – and transfer them to a separate location in the backyard within 12 hours. At random intervals, Angela would be stopped to get in a station that sprayed her with ice cold slime to “decontaminate her”.
A popular reoccurring punishment is forcing houseguests to stay connected, usually through some form of shackle. These punishments always lead to houseguests struggling to stay friends with the person attached to them, often bickering and falling out with them. One of the most memorable tethering punishments is when Britney and Brendon were handcuffed together, and he was criticized for bathing too much.
Before the CBS reality TV show introduced slop into gameplay,
houseguests were forced to eat only peanut butter and jelly sandwiches as their punishment.
But the most feared punishment for those who take part in Big Brother remains the BB Slop. The slop challenge is notorious for being tasteless and unappetizing; both houseguests and viewers who have to match them eat the slop. The show had to start providing sugar supplements to houseguests on the slop diet after Amanda Hansen, a diabetic contestant on season 9, after she fainted.