Celebrity Big Brother USA: How big should the cast be?
If you recall, we made our own wishlist earlier this month at CarterMatt and it contained a whopping thirteen people. That may be less than the standard 16-17 people we see for a standard season these days, but you have to remember that the celebrity edition is likely going to be at least half as short as a regular season. given the start of Big Brother Canada presumably in March, we can’t see this experiment lasting for longer than 45-50 days at most. That is still longer than the Celebrity Big Brother UK season, and we wouldn’t be shocked if the American version is closer to thirty days and used more as a fill-in during the Olympics.
Ultimately, we foresee that the cast will probably be in the 10-12 range, and it could be closer to twelve just to mitigate the high probability that one or two celebrities will quit the show within the first week. That happens often with the UK show. If there are ten active participants over about a month and a half, that would work well within the standard Big Brother format. You could do a Double Eviction or two and everything would still be done at around the right time. If you’re looking more at a 30-day game, you could see the show potentially expand its format to four nights a week with more competitions condensed in there — remember that CBS has experimented with Friday airings in the past for the summer show. If the goal here is to strictly provide counter-programming during the Olympics, this is the way to do it.
You don’t want the Celebrity Big Brother USA cast to be 16 people for a game this short, mostly because there’s almost a zero percent chance you’ll get to know everyone and that would insert too much randomness in the game. Meanwhile, you don’t want to go so small that you screw yourself over in the event that there are some people who quit in the middle of the show.
Rest assured, we’ll have more updates on the Celebrity Big Brother USA season once we know more. Our Facebook is a good place to for almost-constant updates on this show and others.
How big do you think that the Celebrity Big Brother USA cast is going to be?
Share some of your thoughts on the comments now in the comments! Meanwhile, if you head over to the link here, you can see our final interview with Allison Grodner discussing the end of season 19 and how quickly she’ll be planning the celebrity version. Let’s just say it’ll happen sooner than you’d think. (Photo: CBS.)