Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: August 18, 2005
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Big Brother, Season 6, Episode 18. [Stream on CBS All Access]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: The evolution of reality TV fan favorites took an interesting rollercoaster ride in the first several years of the post-Survivor boom. Candid reality like The Real World had gotten audiences used to identifying with and supporting characters who they liked. Good people; kind people; people who spoke their mind but who were on the side of the angels. But once competitive reality became a thing, the idea that aggression and ruthlessness were qualities you had to have to win meant that viewers slowly but surely came around to the idea of supporting what would normally be “villainous” behavior because these were games where deception was necessary to win. You saw it evolve over the course of that first Survivor season. Fans were solidly behind good people/not-great players like Colleen and Gretchen and Jenna, and then when villainous Richard Hatch — who was vain, condescending, and sneaky — ended up winning, fans began to re-evaluate what made for a “good” player, and before long, Hatch was lauded as the best to ever play the game. (He’s since been supplanted and re-villainized for further crappy behvaior, but that’s another discussion.)
Big Brother has never been a show overflowing with good people. And it only took until its second season to produce a villain whose pure villainy made him such a good player that fans eventually game around on him (season 2 winner Dr. Will Kirby). But season 6 was another step in the show’s evolution entirely. Season 6 pit an alliance of mild-mannered but rather pious players who called themselves The Friendship (ugh, I know, right?) against a more ragtag group of six who represented undesirables of various stripes. It was incredibly easy to turn on The Friendship after they ostracized, say, Kaysar for being a Muslim or Janelle for being a blonde bimbo or Howie for being a loudmouth. Who wants to side with the stuck-up kids against the outcasts. But as the battles in the house got hotter, the Janelles and Howies of the house got bolder in their attacks on the Friendship, ultimately resorting to a rather lot of name-calling and verbal abuse. But by that point it was too late; Howie and Janelle (and also Kaysar, who was pious in his own way, and a gullible dummy when it came to playing the game, but that’s another discussion) were already massive fan favorites, and by that point, there was nothing they could do to make the fans turn on them.
So when Janelle won the Head of Household competition (giving her essentially the power to get rid of someone) after a particularly contentious week, she and Howie celebrated loudly and obnoxiously. And when it came time for Janelle to immediately nominate two competitors for eviction, she slapped Jennifer and Maggie up on the nomination block, and then threw in a “Bye-bye, bitches!” for good measure as the show went into its end credits.
Janelle was so fun to watch because she had a decent eye for strategy, a stinging whip of a mouth whenever anybody else came for her, and she was consistently underestimated because she looked like a cocktail waitress (which she was). And she knew how to have a TV moment. Like her drunken fight with Beau about which one of them was a true gold-digger in their real lives. You don’t get this stuff on Mad Men, I’m sorry.
Janelle is probably one of the all time most popular Big Brother players, for good reason. She always knew exactly when the spotlight was on her, so she could make that “Bye-bye bitches!” truly count.
