Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
A. I’m glad you asked. Turn your pagers back to 2000, when – and this may seem hard to believe – Americans didn’t really understand “reality television.” So CBS decided to import Big Brother, placing a bunch of people who didn’t know each other into a bland house, remarkably like an IKEA showroom, with no contact with the outside world.
Anyway, Salon wrote a 69-part account from the innocuous beginnings of the six-night-a-week show (not to mention a live Web feed) to the shallow ending, all the way through the Bay of Pigs of American television: the show got so oppressively boring that CBS attempted to fix the matter by buying out a cast member for $50,000 and replacing him or her with someone more interesting. Inexplicably, and perhaps eloquently, this actually fomented rebellion and the whole cast nearly walked, before the network managed to crush the, um, outsurgents.
