Yesterday's article from one of my local paper's TV columnists, all about BB5 and the vast sucking sound emitting from it.

'As executive proucer on CBS' summer hit Big Brother (8 p.m., Ch. 2), producers Arnold Shapiro and Allison Grodner have a Herculean task. Each summer, they take a baker's dozen of attractive, vain, and unintelligible attention hogs, lock them in a house for three months with nothing to do but eat, clean, and vote each other out, and they have to somehow make this interesting.

They don't always succeed, but in revamping the original, European-run season of 'Big Brother' -- one of the great televised train wrecks of our age -- Shapiro and Grodner have thrown in so many twists that even Chubby Checker would probably tell them enough's enough.

This season's theme has been 'Project DNA,' a.k.a. 'Do Not Assume,' in which two housemates were revealed to be half-siblings who had never met before, while another secretly traded places with her identical twin every few days. Since they were able to pull the scam for a month with no one noticing -- no great feat, considering that the collective brain power of this cast wouldn't be enough to run a night light -- both twins have now been allowed to live in the house and compete as individuals.

So, unless someone else in the house is secretly a triplet, Shapiro and Grodner need to keep devising new and bizarre twists to keep things vaguely interesting. In case inspiration runs dry, here are some suggestions:

* Instead of making the contestants compete for what type of food they'll get to eat that week, make the cost of losing something far worse than dozens of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. If they lose, they get the Muzak version of 'The Girl From Ipanema' piped in 24/7 for the week, or they're forced to watch the unaired episodes of 'Baby Bob', or all their hair and beauty products get confiscated. (With this cast, the men will be more upset than the women.)

* Force animatronic host Julie Chen to move into the house, and let the contestants compete to see who can replace her as host of the Thursday live show. If none of them is up to the task, the producers can always bring back one of the chickens from Season One.

* If not Chen, why not ask CBS head honcho Leslie Moonves to bunk with the houseguests for a while? Would anyone have the guts to vote him out? Would Moonves, forced to spend days on end in the company of these cretins, finally go against the bottom line and cancel the show to spite his annoying new neighbors?

* Take a page from 'The Joe Schmo Show' and insert some actors to pose as additional contestants. Or just go with some more recognizable actors. Tom Sizemore is already in the CBS family as part of the upcoming 'dr. vegas,' and depending on the outcome of his conviction for beating Heidi Fleiss, he might have to do house arrest for a while. Why not slap an electronic anklet on him and send him to serve out his sentence on national television?

(Then again, the last time CBS let a violent type live in the Big Brother house, it was knife-wielding Bayonne bouncer Justin Sebik. Some twists are too much even for Shapiro and Grodner.)

* Give all the contestants a large supply of canned food and drink, then stop all contact. Don't make any announcements over the loudspeaker. If anyone goes into the diary room, ignore them. Make sure the front door is locked, then see how long it takes for the housemates to assume Armageddon has occurred and that it's time to form a new society, 'Lord of the Flies'-style.

With this gang of knuckle-draggers, it should only be a few hours.'

(Alan Sepinwall, Star-Ledger.)

#2 is borderline brilliant. #5 is genius.

• RE: Can we get an honorary Basher induction for this writer?,nailbone, 09:22 AM, 08-13-04
• RE: Dark Matter,foonermints, 11:21 AM, 08-14-04

You've GOTTA get hold of this guy and direct him to us!! This is brilliance, especially that last idea.

Handcrafted by RollDdice

This writer is great, and should be a producer. Or cosmologist. At least he has cures for all the energy being sucked up by BB5.