In the checkout line of life, I always choose the slow cashier. That affords me plenty of time to catch up on magazines like In Touch and Us. Whenever I’m confronted with the Pepto-Bismol color schemes and type sizes I haven’t encountered since I was a Weekly Reader subscriber, I begin to wonder, “Who reads this stuff, anyway?”
They’re probably the kind of people who would kill to appear on “Big Brother” (8 p.m., CBS), now entering its 73rd season. OK, it’s really the 11th season, but it feels much longer.
If you’ve seen this show once, you’ve seen every episode. A dozen self-absorbed people who talk too much enter a bland-looking house and can’t leave. They’re forced to play stupid games and encouraged to gossip about each other. Worse, they don’t seem to be able to read books or magazines or to watch TV — the kinds of things normal people would do if forced to dwell in a perverse Petri dish. So they’re subject to more adolescent mischief than usual.
All this ugly suburban incarceration takes place during the summer, no less, a time when my mother convinced me that it was unhealthy to stay inside all day doing nothing. To this day, the phrase, “Why don’t you go out and play?” fills me with a vague sense of guilt and dread.
And a vague sense of guilt and dread pretty much sums up the “Big Brother” experience. This season, the unhealthy dozen have been divided into teams based on high school cliques: brains, jocks, the popular and the offbeat. What about the clique that wouldn’t be caught dead watching something as dull as “Big Brother”?
As she has since the dawn of time, Julie Chen will host “Big Brother” and feign wonder and surprise about the winners and losers of banal challenges and obvious eliminations.
This season, CBS breathlessly announces there will be a big surprise. A 13th guest. Wow. I don’t know if my blood pressure can handle that kind of excitement.
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