Big Brother 15 Power Rankings - Howard v. Amanda, Perception v. Reality

Which side are you on?

As I move along in my first Big Brother season as a live-feeder, each week deepens my recognition of how producers slant their storylines in the edited episodes. In the BB Blog community that I've discovered, the phrase "getting a good edit" is routinely applied to players who's TV persona comes off in a more positive light than the person that Internet viewers become acquainted with.

Superfans originally worried that this disconnect would prevent the exposure of Aaryn Gries' Texas-sized bigotry, but thankfully those ugly truths became too much to ignore. Now though, four weeks into the game, an actual discrepancy between TV portrayal and online reality has emerged in the person of Howard, thanks to an episode that featured a textbook "good edit."

Big Brother 15 Power Rankings - We Need to Talk About Helen

The 15th edition of Big Brother has already seen several series firsts, and after Thursday night's elimination of Jeremy, we have another. For the first time, the first three evicted Houseguests are all men.

Though plenty of women have won this game before, we've never seen an all-girl alliance take things over and run the show all the way to the end, as several groups of men have done in recent seasons. A few girls have mentioned the idea of blazing such a trail at times this summer, especially Candice, but so far they haven't formalized that chatter into an actual plan.

At one point I thought Helen might be the leader who could gather these scattered strains of feminism together into a truly forceful female alliance. But as her week in the House's master suite showed, Helen may be the oldest, most mature person in this game, but that hasn't made her any more immune to the dangerous disease know as HOHitis.

Big Brother 15 Power Rankings - Are You an Actor???

Though I'm obviously a major Big Brother guy now, I didn't start watching the show until it had been on for several seasons.  But I was always a big fan of Reality TV; from the genre's puckish roots, to its revealing push into the mainstream; from controversial experiments to the hyper-aggressive ubiquity it now enjoys - I am and always have been fully on board with "unscripted" entertainment.

Sometimes it's tough to know what's real...

The problem of course is that anyone with half a brain who watches this stuff will quickly realize that there's nothing unscripted about it. With clever editing and a well-timed off-camera hint or two (do you really think Russell Hantz magically found all those Immunity Idols on his own?), producers can twist the words and actions they capture on video into whatever narrative suits their purposes. That disconnect even became the basis for one intentionally fake "reality" show that inadvertently gave us one of the most authentic moments in the format's history.

Though I take all this for granted when I'm watching most reality shows, I expect a little more from Big Brother.

Big Brother 15 Power Rankings - The House Flips, Then Flips Out

It doesn't get real til Howard carries
someone out of the room

Well, they did it. The insurgent #MomSquad alliance successfully flipped the House and booted Nick, shattering the Moving Company Alliance and taking control of the game. 

The MC goes down as a bigtime failure. Modeled on classic alliances from seasons past like The Brigade and The Quack Pack, these five guys couldn't keep their connection a secret, and ultimately couldn't even keep their connection at all. Jeremy's lame attempts to dominate the other four over the Elissa issue pushed things over the edge. Let's never talk about the Moving Company again. 

Instead, the real story of Big Brother 15 in the wake of Nick's eviction is the ugliest outburst of awful, racially-insensitive behavior yet from Aaryn and her minions.

Big Brother 15 Power Rankings - The Accidental MVP

What should I do as the MVP?
No really, what the hell should I do as the MVP???

A lot of memorable moments inside the Big Brother House this week were either too pathetic, too morally ambiguous, or just too damn NSFW to make it into Wednesday night's POV episode, and as a first-time live feeder, I'm just now getting a real grasp on the real size of the disconnect between the three edited hours that most fans get per week and the nearly 24/7 access enjoyed by super fans. 

I've always cast a critical eye at the editing of this show over the years I've watched it, looking for production tricks that might reveal more about the storyline show runners might be trying to "sell," against what's really going on in the house. I do it even more now that I have access to so much more of the raw video (and now that so much more of the video is so raw).  

Big Brother 15 Power Rankings - Real Live Drama (and Comedy....and Horror)

One of the trickier things CBS does to suck Big Brother fans in to the live feeds is when they start the contest for new HOH at the end of an eviction episode, but design the competition so that it can never finish before the episode ends. If you want to witness the power dynamics shifting in real time, you can sign up and watch everything play out live online.

Even though I've considered myself a pretty locked-in BB viewer for the past few years, I've never succumbed, until now...yes friends, I've become a Live Feeder. 

Big Brother 15 Power Rankings - First Eviction Preview

The biggest Big Brother game in US history finally gets a little smaller tonight, with the first live eviction episode and some seemingly legitimate drama as to who's going home. 

Memo to aspiring actors: Perez Hilton not
the guy you want in charge of headshots

Until then though, the biggest loser in the House remains Aaryn, both in personality and in potential personal appearance fees. She was dropped from her Austin-based talent agency for the character that she's revealed on the live feeds, even if Big Brother producers remain stubbornly consistent in their policy of covering up just how ugly a beautiful Texas girl can actually turn out to be. If I was her, I wouldn't have wanted to be called "the Paula Deen of Big Brother" even before Paula's career went down in flames, so you can imagine how it's got to feel right now.

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.