Sadly, there’s a part of me that still pays attention to news about CBS’ Big Brother, a reality show that’s slowly been evolving into the new Paradise Hotel (or was it Forever Eden where the rules changed regularly, depending on what the producers would generate drama). That’s not to say I’ve gotten increasingly cynical and more and more likely to drop the show quickly. Still, I do feel the need to peek when a new cast is announced:

I’m a bit interested in the gay rodeo cowboy (though Julie Chen’s comment make it clear he’ll be expected to live up to the usual Big Brother treatment of gay men — he’ll be expected to play a confidant to one of the straight women on the cast, sitting on the sidelines of the action until he’s no longer useful to her.

But the biggest stumbling block is the already-odious Dan, who declares he would have left the country if Hillary Clinton had won the presidency. I’m pretty sure he’ll will go far in the game if he doesn’t win. Ever since producer Alison Grodner took over, the show has pushed the misogynistic cretin with at least two winning (I’m not sure about last season’s winner) the whole thing, sometimes with obvious producer interference in the game.

• Dave Carter wasn’t impressed with the Border Concept Store.
• Glen Greenwald looks at the media’s double standards when it comes to bigoted speech from religious leaders. Unsurprising.
• CBS’ Big Brother is inching closer to becoming a Bad Wolf production. Misogyny, racism, homophobia and now with health emergencies for your entertainment. When did CBS’ reality division start imitating Fox?
• Does the brand management at work in Barack Obama’s campaign reveal leadership qualities that shouldn’t be overlooked? I can empathize with his points.
• Cable networks benefited from the writers’ strike while broadcast networks lost more viewers.

Big Brother is getting attention again for offensive things said by it’s cast, this time the offense comes from a houseguest who talked about working with autistic children, calling them “retards”.

At the Television without Pity forums, one poster is quick to bitterly comment about how the media is noticing this complaint, while ignoring the action alert NOW issued regarding one player from last season making frequent rape threats to a female player. That got me thinking — there’s plenty of bigotry to be found in the various Big Brother casts thanks to the live feeds, plenty of which gets covered up — on Big Brother one only needs to be worry about being the first to say something racist, misogynistic, racist, homophobic, etc. The show’s writers can only cast one resident bigot, it seems, so only the first one to say something gets thrown into the disinfecting sunlight.

That comment got me thinking that its only a matter of time that someone used the show as part of an argument that their minority group has it worse than another minority group (known as “playing the oppression Olympics”) — there are plenty of incidents to choose from, enough that any group can find a moment where they were slurred and find an incident where another slur got more attention.

Sigh.

Okay, so I used the writer’s strike to drop my daily TV viewing guide but now that a deal seems to have been made “Tune In” is back, albeit in a slightly revamped form — I’ll mostly try to name one highlight for the day, though some days the TV landscape are a little too interesting, like today.

If you can’t stand American Idol’s audition phase but sometimes find yourself being drawn into the regular cheesy feel-good competition portion, we’re hitting the “Hollywood” portion where the mass of “good enough” gets whittled down to the final 24. Idol’s got my attention back this year by having what seems like its first openly gay competitor (as well as reduced levels of homophobic humor), so I’ll check it out to see how the guy does.

Big Brother, a show I hate to…. uhm, well ‘hate to love’ is wrong because I don’t love it, I just find it frustratingly compelling. Anyway, it returns tonight with two gay men set up as a “love match”. Big Brother has its homophobic tendencies and it likes only one type of gay man (and seems to have an open hostility for lesbians, judging by the one they’ve cast in the show’s entire history) so I’m sure there will be plenty of problems to go with the steps forward. It’s still a breakthrough in gay visibility so I’ll be tuning in, even if I wonder if CBS is playing me for a sucker the way DC comics did to HEAT for the decade before they brought Hal back from the dead.

BBC America also debuts Last Restaurant Standing tonight, which sees several two-person teams try to prove they could run the best restaurant. The more I learn about cooking, the more I curious I get about restaurant operations, so maybe this show will explain to me how one gets a dish that takes 40 minutes to cook onto my table in five that doesn’t seem like its been microwaved or sitting on a warming plate.

On the scripted side, the passibly-funny sitcom Carpoolers returns and former Kid in the Hall Scott Thompson makes another guest appearance. Thompson isn’t as prominent as I’d like but any appearance is welcome.

I have a love/hate relationship with Big Brother… or maybe hate/love/hate is more apt. The show has a dirty, tawdry factor that at the same times seems like all the strawman arguments about how terrible reality television is (hi, Aaron Sorkin!) but it also can have a self-awareness that occasionally pushes it over the line from trash to camp (though it never stays on one side of the line for long). It’s also the only reality show where fans get a peek inside the sausage factory and with the popularity of video sharing sites that peek is more widely available. Fans note every bit of frankenbyting, every distorted edit gets noted. At the very least, it’s a fascinating glimpse into how reality TV is scripted. (In earlier seasons, watching how Big Brother was scripted also made for an interesting creative challenge to observe, since the cast wouldn’t always turn out to be the people producers initially expected… though now the show just edits their behavior to fit the script.) The live feeds make Big Brother a lowbrow show that can justify a lot of intellectual analysis.

And then there’s the show’s place in gay visibility. Last summer, I was complaining about how the show — that usually hopes to spice things up by having at least one romantic pairing happen — has never had two gay men in the cast. Since romantic entanglements come into play — usually women being manipulated by men (the show tends to display a sexist perspective where a woman manipulating a man is a devious schemer, while the opposite is a charming rogue) like Eric and Jessica last season, Will and Janelle in the seventh season, Will and Nicole in the second season, Boogie and Erika in the seventh season, Drew and Diane in season five — that kept the role of gay men on Big Brother as the sharp-tongued sidekick to one of the women in the cast.

And then we got the surprising announcement that there would be two gay men in the cast. Not only that, their romantic history was part of the season’s twist — the season featured “enemies” where houseguests were reunited with people who were supposed to be enemies from their past. (Easily one of the weakest twists in the show’s history, especially since the estranged relationship that lasted on the show couldn’t manage a consistent story.) The two gay men in Big Brother’s eight season were “bitter ex-boyfriends” and, in the first few weeks, the show made no effort to hide their relationship.

This season’s twist has the show playing matchmaker with houseguest secretly paired up with each other based on a “love match profile” that was part of their applications. Among the love matches are a gay and a bisexual man.

A notable difference between the gay men from last summer’s Big Brother and the upcoming one is that this season’s guys are traditionally good looking, suggesting that they’re going to get an equal chance to win over the superficial first judgments of Big Brother’s audience that last season’s gay guys weren’t going to get. They still fall into the catty/bitchy mode that all Big Brother gay guys fall into, but I’m not expecting a show like Big Brother to get too far out of its comfort zone.

So there’s a step forward, here, in that gay men’s romances are being given the same chance to make tawdry drama that opposite-sex couples have been giving us for ages. It’ll be interesting to see where they go and how the producers try to push their relationship — considering the big deal CBS is making of Joshuah’s bisexuality, I suspect they’re hoping for a love triangle a la A Shot of Love with Tila Tequila.

Still, this is Big Brother and as much as I was encouraged by last season’s gay twist, once half of the couple was gone the show became all about how far a racist, sexist, homophobic coot would take his bigotry and how his love for his “estranged” daughter made it all okay. I’ll likely be checking it out, though I’ll probably be wincing throughout.

• I’ve got to tell the spouse that when I die, I don’t want my ashes to shut down a Disney ride.
• Fox News ask questions Montgomery Burns’ Mayoral Campaign would be embarassed to write.
• Scott asks if Superman would really be able to identify people by their heartbeat.
• Allison Grodner promises that the upcoming winter season of Big Brother “will be different from any other season” You know what would make the show really different from recent seasons? Strangers. No, really, the first few casts were successful with none of the houseguests knowing each other. Also, you might shock the viewers if no one gets away with being a racist, misogynistic homophobe as you and your network look the other way.
• Wha-huh? Spike TV was considering a second “season” of The Kill Point? What the rest of Mr. Wolf’s troops were going to botch another bank robbery?

• Attention! Paddington Bear still likes marmalade. Now don’t you feel a little less stressed for having spent ten seconds thinking about a polite, little bear in a peacoat?
• Crazy or brilliant? AC Nielsen plans a social networking site, where users will compare opinions on entertainment media (and provide free data to Nielsen). At first, I thought “Who’s goes to a marketing research company for social networking?” then I realized this could be a draw for the people who like submitting Amazon reviews and otherwise opining online. (Y’know, like I do.)
• There’s still a chance we’ll see an Arrested Development movie yadda
• Big Brother doesn’t look like it’s fading away with accusations of cheating. The thing is, this season’s viewers feel like they saw so much shenanigans on the producers’ part the slightest bit of oddness is taken as a further sham. This season was so incredibly ugly — not because of the vile people cast, but because of the favoritism observed on the producers’ part.
• “See, Alanis, irony’s not so hard to find.

Yeah, I know, most people think Big Brother jumped the shark at the pitch meeting, but I spent my brain power today writing about why this season took the franchise to a new low. This one was a challenge to write, Big Brother is a franchise you can really immerse yourself in, thanks to those live feeds, so I had to keep cutting back on the details (it’s still pretty long, though). Big Brother is a challenging franchise to write about because its fans’ knowledge of the show rivals the superhero fanboys’ knowledge of the minutia of X-Men timelines, so you’ve got to find a midpoint where someone new can follow your point and the fans don’t start saying “You forgot this part.”

But the short version is that in this season Big Brother became the CBS version of Paradise Hotel, with producers changing the rules to suit their whims and excusing several forms of bigotry in the quest for exciting reality TV.

Jen Johnson is still my favorite reality TV person, tho.

Despite my promises not to watch again, I did check out the most recent Big Brother after hearing enough good things to pique my interest. For the most part, I still find myself largely disinterested in watching any more, but last night the only tolerable cast member was eliminated and the show was forced to give her some final moments of airtime.

Jen Johnson has been getting scripted into a largely negative light — one of the major failings of Big Brother’s writers is an inability to adapt to changing circumstances, rigidly sticking to their initial characterization of someone. The first person to say something homophobic gets cast as the resident homophobe and everyone else is free to be as bigoted as they want because they’re not going to show that they cast more than a handful of bigots. Jen started out on the show with some obnoxious attention seeking stunts (crying at the sight of her picture for not meeting her standards of quality, endlessly wearing t-shirts including a pun on her name such as “Jensa Member”) and once she was cast as the narcissistic, self-centered airhead there was no changing that characterization.

That’s too bad, because she turned out to be one of the most interesting reality TV personalities to come around in a while. One refreshing aspect to her personality was that she (despite her early bit of crying) lacked the usual reality TV tendency for melodrama — as the others in the house mined drama out of every little thing and turned minor disagreements into signs of fatal character flaws in others, Jen took it all as a game with a shrug and a chuckle.

There was a social awkwardness to Jen that contributed to making her so interesting. She usually talks with a flatness to her voice and there’s usually a distant look in her eyes. At first, that makes her look like the self-centered airhead the show portrayed her as, but she would sometimes deliver some sharp wit that would come off as very deadpan in how she delivered it. In getting to give her final words to her competitors she said, “In my whole live I’ve always been a happy, positive person… honest. Obvious, I don’t fit in here. But I got thrown this opportunity to be here and happy to leave.” Considering how, at that stage, Big Brother contestants take that moment as their last opportunity to flatter a vote out of the other contestants, it came off as a very dry burn.

Then, upon exiting the Big Brother house she smiled and signed, “Real people!” at her first sight of… well, people who weren’t a part of this season’s Big Brother. Then, for a capper, they let her push a button to dunk her former housemates into a vat of (what they promised was) ice cold water. Now, I normally don’t go for reality TV with a mean streak but considering how ugly this season has been, I would have enjoyed seeing Jen dumping bags of ice in those dunk tanks.

That’s not really to say, overall, that we got a good episode of Big Brother. It was filled with the kind of suck that was too common in this season. However, it was an episode forced to give some time to its unsucky side.

For the past six weeks, I’ve been ruled by an obnoxious but addictive reality show. Following Big Brother is exhausting, I don’t understand how people who can follow the show over the live feeds or even just watching the 21 hours of weekly footage on Showtime. Just reading recaps of the feeds leaves me without time for anything else.

Whenever I do watch the show I usually give up once I realize I can’t stand the houseguests. In season five that was when The Brotherhood of White Straight Male Privilege looked likely to dominate, in the last season I gave up when — I realized the much-hyped Janelle wasn’t as smart as I was heard, watching her be led around by Will was too much. I had already decided that Will was the only one not acting like they were dumber than a bushel of broccoli (especially between that stupid “the floaters have all the power” strategy and those floaters doing nothing to stop their pagonging) and it got pretty tired one person, particularly one that played out some annoying routines in his diary room sessions.

This season, however, I was writing recaps so I was committed to keeping up with the show even as I started to to reach my fill of the series. (And you can tell I’m getting grumpy because I started taking digs at CBS’ fall lineup. Also, I start flat-out insulting the houseguests instead of my usual manner where I bring up why ) However, that’s turned not to be the case and the recaps are over. Yay. I feel my sanity returning. Hopefully this means normal blogging will continue.

Writing recaps was an incredibly valuable experience, however. I used to read the Television without Pity recaps and think “I could never do that.” I don’t think I’m anywhere close to TWoP quality, but there’s nothing like being asked to write a snarky recap to get you to find the potential to do so. (Seriously, this is the first time looking back at my attempts to be snarky hasn’t left me feeling very, very embarrassed.) I’ve also become a little more aware of different styles of recapping, so the way I read various sites is richer for the experience, as well.

My only regret was that I didn’t get to finish off my last recap with an “I am outta here!” Considering that the same week the rocker dad who “keeps it real” added homophobia to the misoyny of his angry repertoire, was the same week that saw they gay guy getting voted out (at the pushing of the show’s producers) I really felt like the live feed viewers got a “Homophobic jerks rule!” message and I would have loved to call that the last straw. It remains implied and, at the least I’m no longer contributing to the buzz for the show.

So, with my commitment to the show over, I got a little bit of — well, what would be the opposite of rubbing salt in a wound? Rubbing silk on your skin? Whatever it is Miss Ali’s recap at TWoP made me feel good when it ended with:

In my entire history of recapping, including the Mike Boogie fiasco and a bunch of episodes of Married By America, I’ve never thought to myself, “I really wish I weren’t covering it, because then I wouldn’t have to watch it.” Seriously, if I weren’t here for you people, I would not watch another episode for the rest of the season, and I’m not just saying that, either. I skipped a few seasons of this show in the middle there, and I didn’t really miss it, and I wouldn’t miss it again. But like Rod Tidwell, I do what I say I’m going to do, so I’ll see you all again soon. I encourage you to stop watching the show and rely solely on us. We’ll tell you if anything important happens, which it won’t.

Amen. This season has reached a peak of suckitude. I’m happy to leave it behind and I’d be thrilled to see the numbers reflect that (especially since it’d counter the cretinous bastard are ratings gold! theory of reality TV).