Field Notes From TV: The Surreal, Strategic World of Big Brother

Entry #1: A philosophical love letter to the most psychologically intense game on television

Yep, you guessed it: I’m a huge reality TV fan. Survivor and Big Brother are my bread and butter. I don’t know how real they truly are, but they feel like the rawest, most fascinating ways to observe not just human behavior, but human game play. What makes Big Brother stand out to me isn’t the drama or the challenges (although I do love OTEV); it’s that the show feels like living inside a board game. The real world fades away. All that matters is the game itself and the people you’re playing against. Every person becomes a human chess piece. The stakes are personal, social, and strategic. It’s a self-contained ecosystem of manipulation, loyalty, and perception.

Many dismiss reality television as “garbage” and or “a waste of time,” but I’m here to argue its philosophical and anthropological relevance. I look forward to continuing to write about this season of Big Brother, which just began on July 10th and airs through October, as well as future seasons of Survivor. Who knows, maybe I’ll do some Real Housewives commentary too.

You can’t talk about Big Brother without discussing Michel Foucault and his concept of panopticism, a theory built on the idea of a surveillance structure where individuals internalize discipline because they never know when they’re being watched. Terrifying right? Well, on Big Brother, it’s not theoretical, it’s literal. The houseguests are being filmed 24/7, with footage continuously broadcast on live feeds. The footage is mostly unfiltered and accessible to anyone with an internet connection and a Paramount+ login. There are no breaks, no off-switches, and no backstage other than the confessional room where producers interview houseguests privately. This footage is eventually edited and aired on TV. The implication of living in Big Brother’s panopticon is haunting: how long before you forget the cameras are there? Can you forget? Or does the impossibility of a private moment eventually break you down until the mask slips, not in a grand reveal, but in a slow unraveling of the performance itself?

That unraveling is part of what makes Big Brother feel like a study in liminality, a concept from anthropologist Victor Turner. He described liminal spaces as transitional zones, moments outside of ordinary structure where normal rules are suspended. The Big Brother house is that space: contestants are cut off from time, technology, and society. They exist in an artificial world with its own rituals, rewards, and consequences. And in that space, a strange kind of bond forms, a temporary community, even as everyone is trying to outwit and evict each other. It’s real, but it’s not. It’s an intense, sacred in-between for those who play and those who watch.

Big Brother doesn’t just simulate reality. It’s a simulation of a simulation. Philosopher Jean Baudrillard would call this hyperreality, a space where signs and images become more real than the reality they represent. The house itself is a soundstage replica of a house. The diary room is a confessional booth made for memes. The gameplay mimics real-world social maneuvering, alliances, betrayals, and manipulation, but in a hyper-condensed format. It’s a fantasy of real life that sometimes feels more emotionally intense than actual reality. You get evicted, and it feels like dying. You win Head of Household, and it feels like ascending the throne.

This leaves me with the biggest question of all: why do I love watching it?

Maybe it’s because it satisfies something primal in me, the desire to observe, to understand, to decode social dynamics without being a part of them. Maybe I love it because it’s a high-stakes version of what we all do every day: try to read the room, protect our standing, figure out who to trust, and navigate the consequences. Or maybe I love the surreal poetry of it all, people trapped in a fake house, being real, being fake, forgetting they’re being watched, then remembering again. It’s weird, messy, and I can’t look away.

This season, the cast is refreshingly made up of average people. No big-time influencers and only one reality-hopping fame-chaser, Rachel Reilly. That return to casting roots makes the simulation feel a little closer to reality, at least for now. The performances are less rehearsed. The stakes feel more personal.

Big Brother isn’t just about watching people compete. It’s about observing what happens when you gamify social life, and the only way to win is to master the very performance you’re trapped inside.