We’re not even finished with Big Brother 28 yet, and yes, we still have a winner to crown. But with the Final 3 waiting for Thursday night’s finale and the live feeds becoming awfully quiet, we’ve had some time to think about next summer and what we’d love to see from Big Brother 29. Maybe too much time. When a beetle named Dentin becomes one of the most exciting developments on the live feeds, you know we’ve reached THAT point of the season.
So while we wait to see whether Taylor, Devens or Drew walks away with the $750,000 prize, we figured we’d start putting together our Big Brother 29 wish list. And here’s the thing: we don’t want Big Brother completely reinvented. That’s actually the opposite of what we’re asking for.
The basic format still works. Put strangers in a house, cut them off from the outside world, make them nominate and evict each other, throw in competitions, alliances, paranoia and a whole lot of lying, and let the game happen. Sometimes the best way to make Big Brother feel fresh isn’t adding another power. It’s remembering what made the show so much fun in the first place.
Give Big Brother 29 a completely fresh cast
Let’s start with a big one. For Big Brother 29, give us a completely fresh cast. No returning houseguests. No veterans from other reality competitions. No stunt casting somebody simply because viewers already know them from another show. Give us strangers.
We want to meet a group of people on premiere night and have absolutely no idea what they’re capable of doing inside that house. Let somebody become a reality-TV legend because of what they do on Big Brother, not because they arrived with an existing reality-TV résumé.
Returning players can be fun occasionally, and we’ve certainly enjoyed some of them over the years. But there’s something special about watching a completely new group figure out Big Brother together. Who is secretly brilliant at the game? Who completely overplays Week 1? Who forms an alliance with somebody they’d probably never speak to in the outside world? Who becomes the person nobody expected to love? Let us discover them.
Give us more age diversity
And while we’re talking about Big Brother 29 casting, let’s really mix it up. We don’t want one older houseguest surrounded by a cast primarily in their 20s. Give us people from genuinely different generations and different stages of life.
Some of the most interesting relationships on Big Brother happen between people who probably never would have met outside the house. A 23-year-old and a 55-year-old becoming an unstoppable duo? That’s interesting. People with completely different life experiences trying to understand each other while simultaneously wondering whether the other person is lying to them? That’s Big Brother.
Fewer powers that can completely change the game
We like twists. Really, we do. But there’s a difference between a twist adding uncertainty to Big Brother and a power becoming so influential that the decisions houseguests spent an entire week making suddenly don’t matter. Let the players play.
If somebody spends days engineering a brilliant blindside, we want that move to matter. If somebody completely botches an HOH, let them live with the consequences. A twist should make the game more interesting. It shouldn’t constantly make us wonder whether anything that happened during the previous six days mattered.
Protect the Big Brother 29 live feeds
Please. The live feeds are one of the things that make Big Brother different from almost every other reality competition on television. The episodes tell us a story. The feeds let us watch the story happen.
We see alliances form before they make television. We watch relationships change. We see somebody casually say something at 2 a.m. that suddenly explains why the entire house flips the next afternoon. And yes, sometimes we watch people sleep. A lot. But that’s part of it.
The feeds give viewers something an edited television episode never completely can: context. Keep them live and let fans watch the game develop.
Bring back more endurance competitions
Remember when an endurance competition could go on forever? We’d love more of that. There’s something uniquely Big Brother about watching exhausted houseguests desperately hanging on while simultaneously negotiating deals with the people standing beside them.
Those competitions don’t always need elaborate sets or complicated rules. Sometimes the drama comes from one simple question: Who wants it more?
Give Big Brother 29 more varied competitions
At the same time, we don’t want every competition favoring the same type of player. Give us mental competitions, physical competitions, endurance, memory, puzzles, luck and challenges that reward completely different skill sets.
Part of the fun should be looking at an upcoming competition and genuinely having no idea who has the advantage. The more ways there are to win, the harder it becomes for one particular type of houseguest to dominate everything.
Bring back food and luxury competitions
We miss these. Not because watching somebody win better food is necessarily earth-shattering television, but because those competitions gave the houseguests something else to do together. Not everything inside the Big Brother house has to revolve around HOH, nominations and Veto.
Give them a ridiculous luxury competition. Make them work together for a giant meal. Put something fun on the line that has absolutely nothing to do with who gets evicted. Those moments can create relationships, arguments and comedy without changing the fundamental game.
Make Have-Nots matter or let them go
Have-Nots are still part of Big Brother, but sometimes they feel like something the show remembers exists and then promptly forgets about. If we’re keeping Have-Nots, make the concept meaningful again.
Show us more of it. Make the decisions matter. Give it an actual role in the social dynamics of the house. Otherwise, why are we still doing it?
Give the Final 2 time to explain their games
This is one thing we’d love to see Big Brother 29 improve because it drives us crazy. Houseguests spend an entire summer lying, manipulating, competing, surviving nominations and building relationships. Then they finally reach the Final 2 and have what feels like approximately 14 seconds to explain three months of gameplay.
Let the jury questioning breathe. Give finalists enough time to explain their decisions, own their mistakes and make an actual case for why they deserve to win. The jury vote determines the entire season. That conversation should feel important.
Make the Big Brother 29 final week more interesting
And that brings us to where we are right now. Look, we love Big Brother. But we have to say it: the final stretch can become painfully quiet. We’re experiencing it with Big Brother 28.
Once you’re down to the Final 3 and the first two parts of the Final HOH are finished, there simply isn’t much game left to play until finale night. We don’t want another twist deciding who reaches the Final 2. Please don’t do that. The Final 3 earned their positions. Let the Final HOH play out and let the winner make that enormously important decision.
But give them something else to do while we wait. Bring former houseguests in for a special event. Give the Final 3 a fun competition that doesn’t affect the game. Let them compete for money for charity. Bring back a luxury competition. Give them challenges based on moments from the season. Let America vote on something fun. Anything.
Give the houseguests a reason to get out of bed and give live-feed viewers something to watch without interfering with the integrity of the endgame. Because when Dentin the beetle starts getting more attention than the Final 3, we may have identified a problem.
Give us a real reunion
After spending an entire summer watching these people, we’d love a proper reunion. Not five rushed minutes while confetti is falling.
Bring everybody back after they’ve had a chance to breathe. Let them watch the season. Let them discover who was actually loyal, who was lying and what was happening in rooms they weren’t in. Then sit everybody down and talk about it.
Imagine a houseguest discovering that the person they blamed for their eviction had actually spent the entire week trying to save them. THAT’S a conversation we want to see.
And sometimes, just let Big Brother happen
Maybe this is the biggest thing on our Big Brother 29 wish list. Stop trying to manufacture every memorable moment. Some of the greatest Big Brother moments happen because producers put an interesting collection of people inside a house and then let them play.
You can’t manufacture every rivalry. You can’t plan the perfect alliance. You can’t predict which two people will unexpectedly become best friends, and you certainly can’t know which houseguest will suddenly decide at 3 a.m. that their closest ally is secretly plotting against them. That’s the magic of the format.
Give us interesting people. Give them a game worth playing. Give us competitions that different types of players can win. Keep the feeds running. Throw in some fun along the way. Then get out of the way and see what happens.
We’re not asking for a completely different Big Brother. With Big Brother 29, we want more of the things that made us fall in love with Big Brother in the first place.
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