Big Brother 15 Power Rankings - Let Viewers See the Ugly, Bigoted Truth? I'm All For It

It's ok, Aaryn, predicting what's going to happen in a game of Big Brother is never easy...

Despite the impressively quick turnaround time on a typical Big Brother episode, the shows that air on CBS three times a week remain slightly behind the real-time events taking place inside the house. If you really want to stay current on what's going on with the houseguests, you've got to follow the live feeds online.

For Power Rankings purposes, I prefer to update my lists after each structured, edited episode on the network, rather than try to stay on top of every single live development. However, a little over one week and just two official episodes into BB15, some of the things happening on-camera but off-air are just impossible to ignore.


Several blogs that do follow the show on a hourly basis have done a great job breaking down the somewhat startling amount of crude, hateful commentary getting casually tossed around by this current crop of houseguests. I say "somewhat" because casual bigotry never shocks me, but I also would've thought that these jerks would realize they're on a national show with cameras and mics everywhere, and I rarely come across people who are actively interested in being thought of as total assholes by millions of their fellow human beings. 

If you don't have time to check out the links above, the shorthand version of the story is that Aaryn, David, Jeremy, and Kaitlin have formed what they see as a Cool Kids Club in the House and they're using this presumed position of strength to be excessively ugly towards the outsiders. We've seen slurs starting with C, F, and N and Q flying around - sometimes in their victims' faces, other times behind their backs (there was even a rare "M.W." thrown in as friendly fire, for good measure). Besides the loathsome foursome, other guilty parties include GinaMarie, Amanda, and Spencer.

I would never try to defend such boorish behavior, but I am interested in trying to understand it. I guess it's a little like the Stanford Prison Experiment - people have that tendency to fall into the roles they think they're expected to play. Big Brother may bill itself as a reality show, but in practice what we get is a group of amateur actors trying to generate drama out of crushingly tedious boredom. It often leads to contestants putting on exaggerated versions of their personalities in order to make a mark and be considered "good TV." Rachel wasn't really that ditzy, Evil Dick wasn't really that evil, and Big Baller Adam wasn't really the idiot savant he played himself up to be (turns out he was just an idiot).

What you expect is what you get

That pressure to be a compelling character without an actual script to follow must push many contestants to let the worst parts of their nature out into the open, and I think that's part of what has happened over and over again with Big Brother. Again I'm not excusing it, just trying to understand. I feel like even if people like Aaryn truly have those horrible, horrible thoughts in their heads, they have to realize they can't express them so easily, and repeatedly, in today's polite society. Maybe I'm wrong and these folks really do act like that back in real life, but it seems unfathomable. More likely my own privileges growing up have made me a little naive to just how widespread and persistent these terrible mindsets remain.

Anyway, the truth is that CBS and the show producers don't give viewers a chance to decide whether or not vapid hatefulness is worth watching in all of its ugly reality, because their policy has been to scrub almost all of those "hateful things" out of the edited episodes. On one level you can understand the policy, and again, this is nothing new, it's been happening since the show started. But 15 seasons and a dozen years into Big Brother's run, the attitude seems even staler than continuing to broadcast in SD. (which, I mean...)

With an open letter on his personal blog, former Houseguest Ragan Fox pretty much summed up all the (correct) reasons why it's time for BB to stop covering for the awful, awful people who let their bigot flags fly with reckless abandon, all while getting to enjoy an experience that millions of much, much more emotionally evolved people would love to get a chance to try. I would only add that hateful attitudes don't go away when you keep them a secret, they evaporate when exposed to the public eye. Right now the lesson for haters like Jeremy is: "Be as vile as you want to be, you'll never have to answer for it." If CBS and Big Brother would show what these people are really saying, even bleeped out, the resulting public shame heaped on those contestants would go a long way towards preventing people from acting like this on future versions of the show.

With that, let's get to the rankings.

Bottom Tier - Living in the Past

16. David
15. Aaryn
14. Kaitlin
13. Jeremy

No shocker here, right?? 

I've often heard it said that much of what we refer to as "racism" is actually just "prejudice," and that true racism requires prejudice plus the power to act on that prejudice. If that's the case, then good news for this crew: You're not technically "racists"!! It would be easy to justify ranking these prejudiced, arrogant know-nothings at the bottom of the power chart simply because of my personal feelings about the way they've been acting, but thankfully the big twist of the season means the game mechanics put them there even without bringing my own biases into play.  

Basically, the BB MVP twist is probably the most powerful tool for the audience to directly affect gameplay that Big Brother has ever seen.  Much more so than the previous Saboteur and America's Player twists, BBMVP means that if the viewers read the game correctly, they can easily put the person in power who will make the move the audience wants to see made.  It's going to be the biggest factor in deciding who wins this summer, I promise.

They're revealing it later this evening anyway, so I'll make just a minor apology for spoiling the fact that viewers voted Elissa the game's first-ever MVP (which goes to show how much people really did learn to love Rachel Reilly over the last few years), and she made David the first-ever Third Nominee on the block.

In past seasons, the deplorable behavior exhibited by David and his crew could often serve to intimidate the house, and as long as they could hold down the HOH room every other week or so, they could go on pretending they were still the cool clique in high school running the show, with reasonable success.  Now, the insiders outside the house can give the outsiders inside the house a weapon that lets us all target those who might act cocky, entitled, whiny, violent, and especially bigoted. From now on no one can rule the Big Brother House with impunity.

I say this foursome's fate is currently circling the drain. 

David brings up the very rear since he's on the block and already looking like a strong candidate to go home first. 

Aaryn probably should be last but she will at least have the luxury of an attempt at damage control next week. I mean we're talking about a girl who can move one letter of her name a few spaces over and get the word "Aryan"...you'd think she might know a thing or two about stereotypes. Now she's got Perez Hilton on her ass, and a petition at change.org where 1800 people (and counting) want CBS to take drastic action. She's an embarrassment to Texas right now, which is saying a lot considering some of the other things that have happened here this week. Whoever ends up most anti-Aaryn in the House over the next few days is a lock for winning the next MVP vote.

The Internet weighs in on Aaryn's antics so far

Kaitlin and Jeremy, the other couple in this group of four, have a better chance than Aaryn to rebound from the ethical and public relations disaster they've been playing part in up til now, but there's also reason to believe this showmance is going to be a rocky one, for however long it may last.

Third Tier - Living in LaLa Land

12. GinaMarie
11. Jessie
10. Judd
  9. Howard

GM is almost worse than the other ugly personalities in the earlier tier because she seems to be just leaching onto them to try and feel cool and fit in. She hasn't done anything in the game except follow Aaryn so devotedly that the Texas blond just may believe she's actually getting away with all this stuff. However that status is also the mark of a chameleon, and there's enough big targets in front of her on this whole firing line that she her long term prospects are at least a glimmer, not a blip.

Keep working on that, Jessie

Jessie somehow got outbratted by everyone below her on this list, so much so that she ranks above them even though she's on the block and even though she has no power whatsoever. The good news for her is that she's become a de facto pawn for everyone else's gameplay, which isn't the absolute worst place to be when there's still 16 players in the game.  I question her ability to ever really get it together, but at this point I can't outright say it'll never happen.

The same really applies to Howard and Judd also, although I think they both earn nods ahead of her based on safety this week, long term challenge potential, and a slightly higher degree of agency than we've seen so far from the prettiest girl in the house.

Second Tier - Living for Tomorrow

8. Spencer
7. Candice
6. Helen
5. Andy

Fringe Hitler apologism rhetoric? Not all that social, bub

Right away, Spencer put out a lot of bluster touting his strong strategic mind and ability to manage the social game. He's since proceeded to sling some pretty serious slurs at women in general, as well as the only gay guy that he's scheduled to interact with over the next few weeks. He's followed up by trotting out the tired old "Hitler was a pretty good public speaker and I can at least admire that..." rhetoric that's always sure to liven up any party. I don't think much of him but I do see him sliding into that "we keep him around because we know no one will ever vote for him in the end" role. Watch for that.

Candice, Helen, and Andy are all drawing a lot of power from sympathy right now, as the other houseguests are not blind to the sins of Spencer, Aaryn and crew. On one level of course it's a weak play, but it will keep you around for a while in the short term, and can get you invited to important strategy sessions down the line. And don't forget about the BBMVP. Right now Andy has shown the most strategic mind out of these three, but none of them are really emerging as strong players just yet.


Top Tier - Living on the Edge

4. Elissa

Elissa makes a huge jump in power this week but keeps the target on her back. She's precariously in the Top 4 thanks to the fans who voted her MVP, though plenty of people still want her gone. Depending on the results of the Veto competition, she may even end up on the block herself (full disclosure- thanks to the links that tracked the bigotry storylines going on, I actually *do*know the results of the Veto competiton, but not how the full Veto process played out). But she did finally start making inroads toward something resembling an alliance, and if things break right she could prove formidable as the game goes on.

3. Amanda
2. McRae

A throwback to an earlier era in air travel

One more LIVE FEED SPOILER ALERT and this one here is more spoilerish than the first: 

Amanda actually, apparently, hooked up w/ McRae in the HOH room this weekend. That's by far the most bizarre development in that madhouse so far, and it only got minor play because of all the more obvious issues to discuss.

 - - -

That move may have proven handy for climbing up the power ladder this week, but holding on to HOH within their alliance is now key, or they end up a pair of the biggest targets next week.  To McRae's extreme credit, even after he and Amanda had gotten to know each other quite well, he was one of the very few to call her out on her contributions to the verbal poison that circulated in the House this week.  The dilemma of what to do w/ the Veto issue and who to ultimately try and get voted out on Wednesday is going to be a destiny determiner, as they usually are for the earliest HOH's.

1. Nick

It's not even close. He probably should've been #1 in the first set of rankings, like my friend Jane argued, but now he's clearly here and might be here for a while. Between organizing the Moving Company, bringing in GinaMarie as a low-stakes, disposable side confidant, and managing the apparently quite difficult task of pissing absolutely no one else off in their first 10 days as housemates, Nick gets the nod. He's set the best foundation for himself of anyone so far, what's he going to build on it?

Not to gush too much, too early, but I also should point out that Nick seems to be the most genuine, most "being himself" person there in the house so far (maybe besides Helen). That would set him up in contrast with what I was talking about earlier with the people who try to force themselves into roles but lose their filter along the way. If it proves true and if he can keep it up, he has the look of a guy that could coast all the way to crunch time in this game.

Namaste to you too, buddy!