Has It Been Newbies Versus Vets And Production This Season?

When it comes to reality shows, I generally like to bury my head in the sand and pretend production interference doesn’t exist.  When my brother goes on and on about how he thinks shows like “The Amazing Race” manipulate cab drivers to suddenly “get lost” driving in a city they live in, I just bury my head.  When Survivor adds crazy twists or changes up tribes when something isn’t going well, I bury my head deeper.  However, listening to Julie Chen continue to lecture Shelly about making her move “so early in the game”, I’m not sure I can continue to bury my head, I may suffocate!

There is already a massive amount of ire against Shelly, including reported death threats for betraying Jeff and Jordan, but to turn the knife even more by Julie was unnecessary.  For starters, Julie is wrong, it’s not early in the game at all, and secondly, it wasn’t a bad strategic move on Shelly’s part at all.   While technically the house has only just begun filling up the jury, so in a regular season it may be considered “mid-game”, but when you factor in the original vet twist, that basically shortened the game quite a bit.  Jeff and Jordan are 1 person, and when you combine them with Rachel, it made the house already essentially down to the “final 5”.  (Shelly, Porsche, Kalia, Adam, Rachel/Jeff/Jordan).

When you then factor in that Porsche and Kalia have been super tight, and Adam up the ass of Jeff all year, Shelly was in a bad position and needed to make the move when she did, or else she was going to be picked off eventually anyway, like Adam would have.  He decided to ride it out, Shelly did not.. it doesn’t make it a bad move, especially considering the move worked!

Jordan and Rachel were on the fast track to being completely eliminated from the house until production stepped in with Pandora’s Box and their game changing option.  Sure, Porsche didn’t have to, and shouldn’t have taken it, and I was fine with that.   However, when Rachel opened her box today, and the entire house essentially benefited from it (Jordan was giving Rachel clothes), that left a slightly bad taste in my mouth.  Porsche’s punishment was completely game changing, but Rachel’s was to sit in a room with a former annoying houseguest?  That doesn’t seem very balanced at all and really makes me question this season.

From being forced to pair up with random strangers competing against pairs of relatives or bf’s/gf’s, to filling the house with very competitively weak players to making some of the key challenges more geared towards vet strengths, it does make you wonder.  While I praise Rachel for winning the two biggest competitions in the house over the past week, the fact is both were geared almost specifically for her, so much that I predicted she’d win any type of competition that involved running.

If a newbie does pull off a victory this season, it will be pretty impressive considering the deck has been stacked against them from the very beginning.  Was Big Brother manipulating the game?  Not directly.  However, it is clear this is probably not the outcome they anticipated when they first picked this cast, and it’s showing based on the twists so far this year.