The 'Big Brother' Season 27 Finale Was a Producer's Nightmare

This, the 27th season of Big Brother, was my first, mostly because, honestly, who has time for three episodes a week for three months? (Apparently, me.) There were 39 episodes, or about 26 too many, and I’ve got some thoughts after the viewing experience on both the game itself and the winner.

First off, I do like the way the game is structured. It demands an exceptional social game. Each week, one player wins a competition to become Head of Household (HOH) and nominates two players for eviction. The rest of the house votes, and the HOH can’t compete the following week. At its core, Big Brother is about damage control. The HOH inevitably pisses off three or four people (depending on the veto outcome) and then has to survive those grudges if one of them takes power the next week. That’s fun!

That said, the competitions themselves are often lame games of chance. Yes, some players rise above — Morgan, Vince, Keanu, and Kelly racked up the most wins — but the contests rarely test strength, endurance, or intelligence. They’re usually about managing chaos or memorizing trivia about the house. Some are fun, others are pure fast-forward material, but it’s a shame that the games themselves are often so determinative (Rachel, for instance, was booted not because she wasn’t good at the game, but because she couldn’t hamster wheel a marble through a maze.)

My chief complaint this season, though, was the casting. The Amazing Race and Survivor just returned, and every season I’m reminded that it takes a couple of episodes to get past the things you don’t like about players before settling into your favorites. After 39 episodes of Big Brother, that never really happened. The cast wasn’t irredeemably awful, but they were often unlikable, uninteresting, or too schticky (Oh, Ava).

Yes, Survivor and The Amazing Race benefit from editing after the fact — they can shape narratives, heroes, and villains. Big Brother unfolds in real time, so the producers can’t massage the story as much. Still, most reality competitions manage at least one or two players with main-character energy. Here, everyone felt like an annoying side character until Morgan finally broke through in the closing weeks.

And then there are the confessionals. Painfully scripted, hopelessly inauthentic, and endlessly repetitive. Every player sounded like they were reading off a cue card of the most obvious observations possible, combined with every reality-competition trope in the book.

I’ll watch again next summer, though, because I suspect this season was an outlier. I’ve seen likable Big Brother alums on The Amazing Race and Traitors, so I know they exist.

That said, what an absolute sh**show this finale turned out to be. It took most of the season for a dominant player to emerge, but by the end, it was clearly Morgan. She crushed challenges, controlled the votes (sometimes through proxies like Vince), and was positioned to sweep the jury unanimously. Then she lost the final competition — a dumb game of “two truths and a lie” — and Ashley wisely voted her out, since she had no shot against Morgan.

That left Ashley, who spent the season coasting behind Morgan and Rachel, versus Vince, who schemed, lied, and manipulated his way to the end only for all of it to blow up in his face at jury. He lost 6-1, partly because Ashley reached the end with little blood on her hands, while Vince was practically bathing in it. It didn’t help that Vince literally looked like a hipster Snidely Whiplash (the emotional affair he had with Morgan probably wasn’t helpful, either, and I seriously doubt Vince is going to be able to lie, scheme, and manipulate his girlfriend back home after the show).

In the end, Vince essentially lost to Ashley for the same reason Parvati lost to Sandra in Survivor: Heroes vs. Villains: He alienated too many people while playing the best game (or the third best game, behind Morgan and Rachel). Ashley, meanwhile, lucked into the win. She got dragged to the end as the goat, cut the best player at the last possible moment, and faced the least likable finalist. It was a hugely unsatisfying disaster that saw one of the least deserving players — likable as she may have been — take home the title. The Big Brother producers must have been gnashing their teeth, hoping for a Dallas Cowboys vs. New York Jets Super Bowl, only to end up with the equivalent of the Tennessee Titans defeating the Jacksonville Jaguars 18-3 in a game with seven field goals.