‘Big Brother Canada’ premiere review: Commence the madness

Typically, we’re going to have our “Big Brother Canada” reviews up a little bit sooner after the episode airs. However, we’re running a bit late tonight after spending some time at the show’s premiere party, so we had a chance to chat with some other like-minded journalists / fans along with a certain former winner and personal favorite in Dan Gheesling. We’ll have a full interview with him coming up tomorrow.

So after trying slop (it’s as gross as you would imagine), sampling a turkey burger that reminded us of Chef Joe Arvin, doing a Diary Room session that you can watch below, and also and getting more amped up than we can possibly put into words, the premiere arrived … and it was pretty awesome.

Let’s start here with the changes in the format from the American show, some of which may be temporary. Host Arisa Cox narrated a little bit more than Julie Chen does in America, though this may have been the network Slice introducing her. She really did a pretty great job: she didn’t try too hard to emulate Julie Chen, but she captured enough of her while adding her own personality that she totally came across as believable.

We could just get to the basics here and say that Suzette is the Head of Household, Tom and Emmett were the first nominees, and that Tom won the Power of Veto by popping balloons and making a puzzle out of them … but if you stop there, you’re really not enough of a fan of a show. Here are some assorted takes on what happened during the episode:

-Alec is ridiculous for admitting to be a Ph.D student on the first day, and in psychology no less. Why put that sort of target on you right away?

-One male houseguest accidentally throwing his bag down the stairs may be the greatest entrance to any Big Brother house in human history.

-Who else thought that Suzette made a mistake putting these two guys on the block? If we personally were her with the first HoH, we would have put up weak players, who we knew could not beat later on. Why? There simply was not enough time to shake out alliances in the hour she was allotted for her to determine that two strong guys were the right people to cross.

-We dig the twist where you receive phone calls from Big Brother for secret missions, but the voice? Not so much; as our lovely Mrs. Carter put it, it sounded a bit like Christian Bale as Batman, and we prefer the goofy Big Brother Voice from the States.

While the premiere moved very quickly, we have to say that it was really just as entertaining as we were hoping and then some. It did not feel like a watered-down version of an American show, and you could see that there was time and effort put into everything. Now, we just have to hope for Emmett to stay because he seems like a nice guy.

Want more “Big Brother Canada” goodness? Be sure to check out our page here for continuous updates, upcoming exit interviews, and spoilers from the live feed.

Photo: Slice