Interesting discussion regarding Matt, Ed and Caleb. I think all 3 of them suffered from the same problem in the first half of the game, and that was that they weren’t really prominent enough characters and spent most of their time hanging out in the gym, which doesn’t make for entertaining TV. Tim and Drew were a popular bromance that season because they provided good entertainment value as a duo. Matt/Caleb and later Matt/Ed tried to do a similar thing, but they weren’t entertaining enough personalities for it to work.
Arguably, Caleb and Matt going home early benefited Ed in that it forced him to start interacting more with the other housemates and go all in on his showmance with Jade, which helped give him more screen time. While I hated the showmance between Ed and Jade, and found it painful to watch, I accept that it made Ed a much more prominent character by giving him a central storyline. He got a lot more screen time in the second half of the series when he became more involved with Jade, compared to the first half when he was hanging out with Caleb and Matt. And looking back, the only things that he is really memorable for is the Jade thing and his feud with Tim.
Taking that into consideration, I do wonder what would have happened if Ed had gone earlier and Caleb or Matt had been the one to survive long term. I think Caleb could have done well in this scenario. Both Matt and Ed were quite laid back and serious, where Tim and Drew were more fun-loving and enjoyed doing stupid stuff for fun, hence Ed and Matt didn’t really gel with Tim and Drew. Caleb strikes me as the type of person who could gel with either group. He loved the gym and exercising, but he also seemed to have more of a fun partying side to his personality that Matt and Ed didn’t have. He just became close with Matt in week 1 due to them being in the halfway house together, and then stuck with that relationship until his eviction. But this meant spending most of his time in the gym with Matt and Ed, which emphasised the less interesting aspect of his personality. Without Matt and Ed there, I wonder if he would have gotten closer to Tim and Drew, which would have made him a bit more entertaining? I think Caleb’s personality wasn’t as opposite to them as Ed’s was.
Matt OTOH is someone who I’m not really sure about. I don’t know where Matt would have fitted in socially if Ed had gone home instead of Matt on the night Matt left. Ed used his showmance with Jade to stop himself from becoming isolated, and this brought him closer to Mikkayla as well. Matt didn’t have any showmances to help him, and he didn’t get along with Mikkayla at all. I think his more serious personality would hinder his ability to gel with Tim and Drew, similar to what happened with Ed. Though maybe Matt would have been less staunchly anti-Tim than what Ed was. Matt did seem to have a good friendship with Tahan, so maybe he would have become closer to her, as she was also feeling a bit isolated around that time. I think Matt had the potential to be more interesting given his backstory. Looking at the vote tally, he was actually quite popular in the beginning. In the second eviction, Matt was nominated and had a really high ‘Vote to Save’ percentage in which he tied with Ben for ‘most saved’ that week, but his popularity declined really quickly after that. I think he is the type of housemate who could have gone far in a ‘Vote to Evict’ system instead of ‘Vote to Save’. This is because he is too dull to maintain a big enough fan base that would consistently vote to save him, but he isn’t annoying enough that people would be motivated to want him removed. He has a bit of that ‘nice guy’ persona that could potentially win a public vote if he makes it to the end with some more divisive personalities, and the idea of a war hero winning BB would be marketable if he gets close enough to the end when winning becomes a real possibility.
Caleb’s faces. Oh gosh he was hilarious.
the cast was really good imo too. Camilla, Anna, Dave, Krystal, Michael… up late, the scandals in the house and outside the house with Gretel, with government speaking out about their disgust for bb- the whole bb series was an event. I love 2013, but 2006 was something else. I’m pretty sure I still recall on this website a threads and threads about saving John and Ashley etc. it was chaos on here and I lived reading it, watching it, seeing it in the news, all of it
