The “Big Brother” executive producers, Allison Grodner and Rich Meehan, spoke to Entertainment Weekly on Monday to defend season 27’s incredibly controversial hamster wheel twist. “I know people were clamoring for [those higher stakes] and a lot of people really did enjoy it,” Meehan told the news outlet.
The Hamster Wheel Twist Explained
CBSThe hamster wheel maze was first introduced not on “Big Brother,” but on the show’s winter spin-off, “Big Brother Reindeer Games.” The show itself had a very different premise than the flagship show. The houseguests were all returning players who did not actually live in the house while filming, and there were no live feeds to watch the players 24/7.
“Reindeer Games” also differed from “Big Brother” in format. Instead of a social strategy game where players are evicted by votes, “Reindeer Games” was far more competition focused, borrowing from the format of MTV’s “The Challenge.” While some social strategy was definitely necessary, players were eliminated via competition losses rather than exclusively by votes.
The hamster wheel was one of those elimination challenges. One at a time, players had to guide a ball through a maze, done so by moving a giant hamster wheel. The first player to go had a set amount of time to complete the challenge. If they completed it, they selected the next player to go, who had one fewer minute. The competition went on like that until someone could not finish the maze in their allotted time. That person was sent home.
The “Big Brother” producers liked the challenge so much, they brought it back for the flagship show’s 27th season. When Rachel Reilly was unable to navigate the maze in time, she became the first person in the history of the show to be eliminated, rather than evicted, without any votes against her.
Reilly’s elimination caused outrage among fans and alumni. “Big Brother” season 15 winner Andy Herran posted on X, “I can feel something shifting and my love for the show waning. It is no longer the game I deeply respected and won. It is now a carelessly-crafted joke that values comps over strategy. Breaks my heart.”
Four-time “Big Brother” player Janelle Pierzina also wrote on X, “The game wasn’t broken! Why meddle?”
What The ‘Big Brother’ Producers Are Saying About The Twist
Although fans and current houseguests alike complained that the twist made “Big Brother” a full-blown competition show, rather than a show of social strategy, in a season that already included an extra safety comp, Grodner disagrees. ““There absolutely was a social element to this. In Reindeer Games as well. Remember, not everyone was going to go into that wheel. So your relationships and where you stood in the hierarchy of things and your threat level and the way that you worked in those 10 minutes and jockeyed for position [were key],” she told Entertainment Weekly.
Meehan agrees with his co-worker, saying, “It was absolutely built to be social and strategic as well as competitive.” It’s important to note that while the order the houseguests played the hamster wheel could have been strategic, someone had to be eliminated via the competition.
To Meehan and Grodner, the hamster wheel twist was simply a reordering of a typical “Big Brother” week. Specifically, Meehan said, “The initial challenge is kind of like [a Head of Household competition], you can save yourself. But then you start to chain, and if you get sent to the hamster wheel, it’s kind of like a Veto, where you have the opportunity to save yourself. Now, the big difference is instead of saving yourself with a vote after, you have to save yourself with a vote before. … The social and strategic element precedes it versus happening after.”
Meehan also pushed back on the idea that the hamster wheel twist was unfair in anyway, saying, “Ultimately, fairness is everyone playing by the same rules, and they were all playing by the same rules.”
Despite the backlash, the hamster wheel is not officially retired. Meehan told Entertainment Weekly, “Is it something that could come back? It probably could come back. Will it definitely come back every season? I don’t know about that.” Grodner concurred, saying, “Future houseguests should be ready.”
