Why 'Big Brother' 2014 Is Lying To You Worse Than Ever

The concept of power is a funny, complex thing.

It has a tendency to corrupt; it can be equated with knowledge; it can precede a variety of words from “play” and “game” to “struggle” and “bottom”; too many people are denied it, and people can have too much of it; and when people have too much of it, they can get drunk on it – and Channel Nine is standing-on-the-table-at-a-wedding-sans-pants-and-casually-abusing-the-extended-family smashed.

“Power” is at the very core of this year’s series of Big Brother. Aside from the “epic”-themed ad campaign for the show, of which I was only made aware while hate-watching The Block beforehand, it’s a fact made pretty immediately clear from this premiere episode’s expensive-looking outset, with its dance/parkour-ish opening routine replete with bare-chested half-silver fit men, drumming, a light show that should include an epilepsy warning, and Sonia Kruger, pretty eye-searing in pink, waltzing through the milieu, mentioning the word power again and again. It’s like she’s trying to convey a very simple concept to a large group of children, because she probably knows a lot of her audience is… you know. Challenged.

Lest she lose the attention and understanding of those in the crowd and at home, Kruger moves swiftly on to the first Housemate for the year, 27-year-old Indian-born Priya, who is sassy and fierce and doesn’t give a flying fuck what you think of her. She doesn’t “have a filter”, and says that “what you see is what you get”.

She’s a constant stream of sentiments that are much less deep than she thinks, like the syntactic equivalent of someone diving headfirst into a shallow creek, only, instead of injuring herself, she gets rewarded for having the seemingly random luck of being the first person on the stage and being made “Head of the House”.

Priya is then told that Big Brother will be played in pairs this year, and she has to pick from two candidates with whom she can choose to partner – one with whom she is a good psychological match, and another with whom she is not. But she does not have the power of knowing which is which, because this show is apparently very flip-floppy with giving people control over things.

After a brief video introduction to the candidates – by the way, the whole thinly veiled Tinder aesthetic to the Housemates’ mini-vids and on-screen “player cards”, if you will, feels like a lazy design decision – she picks 25-year-old Sydneysider, reverend’s daughter, and atheist Katie, who seems to be excited just to be breathing, and is a bubble of newfound self-esteem and confidence after losing some weight recently. That’s actually really good for her, so congratulations for developing a sense of impulse control and all, but apparently a good heaping chunk of her personality also escaped with the kilos. It doesn’t matter, though; she’s made co-head of the house with Priya, who we find out (but they don't) is in fact a bad match for her chosen partner.

Anyway, here’s the house! It’s a two-storey deal this year for the first time ever, with a pool and a transparent cylindrical tank kinda just sitting next to it, out in the middle of the open-air courtyard, an outdoor gym, a treehouse, an indoor sauna, and shitloads of flamingos. Flamingos on the lawn, flamingos on the wallpaper, flamingos everywhere. Which just… only makes marginally more sense in light of the fact the bedrooms are themed around penguins and peacocks.

No time to dwell on other birds, though, because we’re back with Kruger soon – after Priya and Katie do a quick tour of the house and get summoned to the so-called “Power Room” (Remember? Power? Remember that?) by the eponymous large sibling – and more flamingos are suddenly in our faces in the shape of 25-year-old Brisbane-based Jake’s eye-searing shirt. He’s the potential partner rejected by Priya, he’s flamboyant and out there and kind of endearing, but we’ll see how that goes as the series wears on.

Jake is shown his partner choices, and he picks 29-year-old netballer, nurse and redhead Gemma, from Perth, who is the first instantly likeable person we’ve seen so far, and happens to be incredibly tall. So tall, in fact, that Jake, upon meeting her, can’t help but have a very physical, awe-struck reaction, as Kruger asks his new partner, “You’re quite tall; how do people react when they meet you?” because she is apparently either not very bright or not very aware of her surroundings. Off they go into the house, for Priya and Katie to creepily watch them from the Power Room (which, oddly, doesn’t have an oversized oil painting of Kerry Packer hanging in it) and immediately start making judgmental comments, flexing their obviously deep-seeded sociopathy freely (and very, very early) in front of the nation.

Our next contestant is 31-year-old radiographer and Jake rejectee David, who loves his beard a bit too much and is carrying a very obvious chip on his shoulder over having been cheated on, but it’s hard to feel too bad for him for too long, because he’s also one of those guys that doesn’t wear socks despite being in long pants and closed-in shoes, and he calls women “females” in a conversational setting. He picks Sandra, 30, a “very single” Bonds store manager and erotic fiction enthusiast from Wagga Wagga who still lives with her parents but seems like a bucket of fun and sweetness, to be his partner and, from the stupidly early looks of it, the target of his affections. They, too, enter the house, meeting the previous pair of tenants while, again, the House heads watch on like total perverts with a judgment complex.

We’re then introduced to 24-year-old apparent misogynist and borderline narcissist Dion, who “hates ignorance” but also goes on a tirade about how he thinks women “do not respect themselves” and that they "should respect themselves more”, because his wealth of life experience as a less-than-30-year-old professional jerk-stain has given him a sixth sense for these sorts of things.

The odd thing is, when he comes out on stage, plenty of women still seem to cheer for him, despite the fact he may very well lead a double life as valiant superhero Captain Buzzkill, who goes around to various parties acting jaded and superior because he thinks people who drink do so because “they’re not happy”, rather than because drinking in such a way as to not be a slurring, messy cockwit can be lots of fun. It’s kind of amazing he has such sharp social awareness and perception with his head jammed so deeply into his anal cavity.

He teams up with colourful 26-year-old Canberran real-estate agent Jason, who is in every way a more redeemable human being than the person Dion didn’t choose, Skye.

Skye is a 20-year-old tanning-salon victim from the Gold Coast who takes great pains to paint herself as the “ditzy blonde” of the house, which is a terrible stereotype to perpetuate, as she acknowledges that she’s okay “in small doses”. Then again, most poisons are. Poor 29-year-old shopaholic Sydneysider and Instagram-lover Lisa ends up as her teammate for the duration of the game. Now will come the real test of how safe the Big Brother house actually is, because Lisa is almost guaranteed to be looking for ways to end it all by Friday.

The final two contestants – 24-year-old Victorian Travis, who wears a baseball cap… backwards… indoors, and 26-year-old Queensland-based graphic designer Ryan – look like they are all set to put the “bro” back into “Big Brother”, with Ryan seeming a little too eager from the get-go to be BFFs with the slightly reluctant and possibly marginally homophobic Travis.

With Team Ryvis finally in the house, the true games begin, and Priya and Katie emerge from the Power Room to execute their first Big Brother-instigated “Power Play” – and here’s where the whole stupid concept of this year’s show begins to fall apart, and the disingenuousness at its core begins to shine through like high-beams on the highway to self-loathing.

The problem with pretending that this season is all about “power” is that the Housemates, really, effectively have none. Yes, the Heads of House, who are supposedly going to change throughout the series, have “power” in the sense that they have to make decisions that impact the whole household, from the trivial (“someone has to spend the night in the stupid transparent cylinder while everyone else parties! Isn’t that wacky?”) to the slightly more serious (“hey, here’s $1000, just for you two, if you want it, but nobody gets to eat anything but power shakes for a week, no big.”) – but only because Big Brother tells them to.

The very way in which this season is structured – from the mandatory pairs to the Heads of House to the Power Plays – is all about string-pulling, but not really by the Housemates, as though the executives behind the show no longer believe that there is viable entertainment value in just putting twelve strangers together in a house for three months and seeing just whatever the hell happens in the name of curiosity and belief in the innate excitement of the human endeavour.

Seriously, think back to 2001, the first season of Big Brother, when the disembodied voice was less intrusive and more a softly guiding influence/sounding board, and then think about how, in each ensuing year, the Housemates were conscripted more and more frequently into increasingly banal or humiliating or otherwise interruptive tasks, like “EVERYONE GET IN THE DANCE CIRCLE FOR SIX MINUTES EXACTLY,” or “IT’S 6.14PM! ARE YOU ALL WEARING YOUR TRADITIONAL GRASS SKIRTS AND DOING THE CHARLESTON?” And, by this stage, we’re being forced into a heavily orchestrated three-ring circus of collusion and conspiracy, as though human beings aren’t totally capable of being conniving arseholes to each other all on their own. When the least artificial things in the House are Skye's collagen-inflated lips (dude... you're 20), you know that something is way the hell off in Big Bro-town.

It’s about that time that Priya and Katie are forced to send the unfortunate Dion and Jason to spend the evening in the “fish tank” – the glass cylinder in the centre of the courtyard – and we leave the rest of the House to meet and greet each other while Sonia Kruger rhetorically asks if the audience could even imagine what it would be like to be stuck watching other people party all night through the barrier of a glass tube.

The irony of her asking us that question now, as if that isn’t exactly what we’ve been doing for the past sixty minutes, is just a little too much to bear.

Someone, please – shut off the power.