Bigg Boss made its extreme debut on the small screen in2006. This provocative reality show has made eye catching successive seasonafter season, and has been tagged as one of the highest-rated shows on Indiantelevision. However, it seems to be faded its shine in its current season, thistime the show is getting too bored day by day.
Audience is likely to be considered as losing their interesttowards this reality show.
Bigg Boss in India is based on the show Big Brother, whichwas first aired on Dutch TV in 1999. Originally sketched as a socialexperiment, it was designed as The Truman Show in real life. Since that day,Big Brother format has run 448 seasons in 54 franchise countries andterritories.
The show also drew inspiration from George Orwell'sdystopian novel 1984, where Big Brother was a fictional character, atotalitarian dictator. The novel spoke of a future where each and every personwould be under constant watch by surveillance cameras, even inside their ownhomes. The intention was to generate fear, suspicion, and insecurity among themasses. The show aims at setting up a similar atmosphere within the house amongthe contestants, by placing them in a confined milieu for months under theconstant surveillance of CCTV cameras.
Bigg Boss arrived in India with fanfare in 2006 andBollywood actor Arshad Warsi was the show's first host. The show has now runfor 14 seasons successfully. However, things have not been as exciting lately.Faced with the threat of ending up with one of the most boring seasons ever,the makers have now reintroduced a few older contestants such as Kashmera Shah, Rakhi Sawant, Vikas Gupta,Manu Punjabi, Rakhi Sawant and Arshi Khan to spice up things.
Could it be that, instead of merely bringing back pastcontestants, the makers should have focused on bringing back a few of the pasttricks that made the show so popular among hardcore fans?
IANS has listed a few key ingredients that made the showlegendary in India, ones that fans would surely love to see back in the show.
Secret Nominations
Bigg Boss, when it started, was all about game play,strategy and manipulation. The current season is anything but that, courtesyopen nominations. This leaves the show open playground for politics and trivialquarrels. For example, a task was given where housemates were asked to nominateopenly by using foam on the person they wanted out of the house.
Frequently using of the confession room
In the preceding seasons the famous Big Boss confession roomwas accessed by one housemate at a time for nominations in a weekly ritual.These nomination shows were watched by millions and added the X-factor of theshow. The contestants would be seen talking to the voice of Bigg Boss for rhymeand reasons as to why they are nominating the other housemates. Once thenomination process finished, Bigg Boss would then announce the names of peoplewho have received the maximum votes and were up for eviction. None of the othercontestants knew who the other one nominated in the cloak and dagger process.Theconfession room has only featured once in the 14th season, when Rubina Dilaikbroke down in the show in the earlier days.
Secret Room
Fake evictions used to be one of the most interestingsegments of the show. The fake-evicted contestant would be taken into a"secret room", where they would be staying for a few days and keepingconstant vigilance on what each contestant is saying or doing behind his/herback. The secret room created more mistrust amongst the contestants. Translated,that meant more drama.
Luxury tasks
They say that hungry can kill for food. Food deprivation hasbeen the root cause for several famous fights over theseasons. The "luxurytask", as it was called before, had things such as coffee and chocolatesamong many other things. Though in the current season there is sponsorshipnamed tasks for luxury goods. Earlier, there was a budget. A board along withthe prices of these goods was given and the contestants had to be in the budgetto buy them from Bigg Boss. This created a very strong economic system insidethe house, thereby leading to more feuds.
Jail
The Jail was introduced in Bigg Boss about a couple of yearsago. Unlike the Red Zone in the 14th season, the Jail was for punishinghousemates over bad performance in the tasks. However, in the 14th season themakers came out with a Red Zone, which was mainly for those who were beingnominated. The Jail has not featured so far in the current season.
Top-level contestants
The contestants have always been the centrepiece of theshow. Bigg Boss has seen popular names such as Sunny Leone, Pamela Anderson,Sreesanth, Carol Gracious, Shamita Shetty, Jade Goody, Andrew Symonds and BaniJ among many other names, and such people grabbed eyeballs.