See Big Brother Announce A Major Milestone
Big Brother announced that it will be coming back for its 25th season.
This article is more than 2 years old
After a historic 24th season of the hit reality show Big Brother, CBS has announced that the competition series will be returning for a landmark 25th season in the summer of 2023. The announcement was made by host Julie Chen in a video posted to Twitter, just after the reality show crowned its latest champion in the season finale.
After thanking the current season’s contestants, and plugging the upcoming reality shows Survivor, The Amazing Race, and The Real Love Boat, Chen revealed “We are coming back for our 25th season of the show…Expect the unexpected…I’ll see you next summer.”
The announcement comes as the show made its own history by having its first-ever Black woman win the reality show competition. Taylor Hale won the Season 24 Championship in a final vote of 8-1 from a “jury” of previously-evicted “HouseGuests” on Sunday night.
Hale scored $750,000 for the win, and took home an additional $50,000 after viewers named her the Big Brother “America’s Favorite Houseguest,” the first time in the show’s history that the winner was also voted the favorite player, according to a report by Deadline.
Last season, Xavier Prather was the winner, the first time a Black person won the competition. In 2019, singer Tamar Braxton won the second season of Celebrity Big Brother, a spinoff of the show. The wins came after CBS mandated that casting for their reality shows become more racially diverse, in a response to online criticism.
First airing in 2000, Big Brother is a unique reality show in which a group of strangers, called “Houseguests,” are forced to live together under the same roof (actually a specially-constructed house on the CBS lot) for months, with no live contact with the outside world besides occasional chats with the show’s producers or host Julie Chen.
Contestants are filmed 24/7 with numerous cameras, with live feeds available to watch on Paramount+ and edited episodes on CBS primetime. Each week, a houseguest is evicted in a vote, with competitions for “Head of Household” allowing one contestant to save themselves or someone else from eviction.
In addition to scoring big ratings for CBS during the summer season, Big Brother reportedly is dominating on streaming as well. CBS announced that the show’s primetime episodes and live feeds have pulled in over 11.5 billion minutes of viewing across broadcast and streaming since the July 6 premiere.
That’s more than even the smash hit Stranger Things for Netflix, which had nearly 9 billion minutes watched by viewers during the same time period. Big Brother episodes consistently rank in the top ten broadcast shows for the week, airing on Sunday, Wednesday, and Thursday.
With live cameras watching contestants’ every move, Big Brother often generates controversy, and this season was no exception. However, the controversy took on an ugly tone, after accusations of racism went flying between houseguests.
A white player tried to form an all-white alliance of contestants after claiming that the show’s black contestants were forming an alliance to vote off white people and ensure a person of color won (two of the final three contestants were Black).
Even host Julie Chen spoke out, calling fans “hypocrites” for calling out the “mob mentality” of Big Brother contestants while exhibiting the same behavior online.
Anyone interested in appearing in the 25th season of Big Brother can apply by visiting the website BigBrotherCasting.tv.
