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ShowsBig BrotherSeason 18
Aired summer 2016 · The returnee mix revisited

Vets and Newbies Reprise

The season the format revisits its veterans-and-newbies engine, five years after the original run. Four returning houseguests — recognizable faces from the prior decade — slot in alongside twelve newcomers, and the Roadkill twist gives the week a secret third nominator the house has to identify. The Battle Back competition pulls an evicted houseguest back into the game. The texture is sharper than the takeover season that preceded it. A confident reset for the modern era.

Filmed
Studio City, California
Premiered
Jun 22, 2016
Episodes
37
Format
16 houseguests · four vets, twelve newbies
the format reprises its returnee-and-rookies engine
Host
Julie Chen
On this page4 sections
  1. 01The take
  2. 02Where it sits in the canon
  3. 03Adjacent in the canon
  4. 04Also appears in
01The take

A rerun loses novelty.

02Where it sits in the canon

The #12 slot.

Slot #12 of 27 in the Big Brother Editor's Canon. Twelfth, a long way below the original Veterans vs. Newbies template at #5, and a useful measure of how much a returnee premise loses on a rerun. Same engine, run again five years later — the drop from #5 to #12 is the canon's argument that novelty was doing more work in the original than the format alone ever could. It still ranks ahead of the Team Captains at #13 because returning players, even in a diminished repeat, generate more texture than a newbie-only cast can promise on paper, though barely — the gap between these two slots is the thinnest in the canon's middle stretch.

No spoilers. Every page is reviewed before it goes live.
04Also appears in

Cross-references.

Big Brother: every summer gets its own twistlist · 25 entriesNot who they say they arelist · 13 entriesBig Brother — Editor's CanonEditor's Canon · #12