Big Brother Australia 2026 rumours

Given how utterly bad Survivor has performed in the first week, I'll bet Big Brother is looking more and more attractive to Ten right now. They need tentpoles that draw audiences, and Big Brother's numbers are looking even better by comparison.
I think it's a safe bet we're getting another ~October start date. I only pray it's extended and improved from what we got last year.
 
Given how utterly bad Survivor has performed in the first week, I'll bet Big Brother is looking more and more attractive to Ten right now. They need tentpoles that draw audiences, and Big Brother's numbers are looking even better by comparison.
I hope Ten does not see this attractiveness as permission to do two seasons a year.

Doing two seasons a year of any reality TV show does not seem to work for the local Australian market over here. Maybe in the USA it does, not here though.
 
I hope Ten does not see this attractiveness as permission to do two seasons a year.

Doing two seasons a year of any reality TV show does not seem to work for the local Australian market over here. Maybe in the USA it does, not here though.
Even BBUS has had mixed results running two seasons in a year. I’d say it’s really only ever truly “worked” was 2018 when they ran CBB as counter programming for the Winter Olympics. In that way it felt like a TV event like Survivor premiering on Super Bowl Sunday used to be. It was must watch and gave the show a lot of attention.

That said I think two seasons might be getting a bit too much for them too. They could probably go down to one regular series in the fall with a slightly shorter more “experimental”/spin-off series earlier in the year. Kind of like what BBUS did with running Reindeer Games. I hear a lot about “new era” Survivor having a marked decline in quality and a lot about budget kind of being a factor in that. I think they’d end up getting roughly the same amount out of this strategy for less money as they’d be able to cut their time in Fiji down by at least two weeks or so. Cutting down from 39 to 26 days obviously was a significant cost savings or they wouldn’t kept it so another two weeks should be enough to go back to 39 days days for the regular season and they could easily film something with either returning players or The Traitors level “celebrities” in roughly two weeks that would give them 10 - 13 episodes.

Two series I think really only ever “worked” for BBUK when they ran CBB as an early new year “treat” with the summer civilian series as the main course. These days I think they really need to make one or the other their sole focus… It’s either they work on building up the civilian series or go all in and make CBB the only series. Especially in the era where the civilian series is only being run a few weeks longer than what they can get away with for CBB. Whether it was intentional I’m hopeful not resting CBB in 2026 brings at least some improvement to the civilian series.

Anyways my point is running two series really only works when the two complement each other.
 
We all said rather than rushing BB out back in November they should have held it over to now - I don't think it would rate much differently even against MAFS. That said though given they squeezed in I'm a Celebrity first they'd probably have still only had a 4-5 slot for it as they'd likely finish it before Easter.
 
I think at the end of the day BB isn’t the ratings powerhouse of yesteryear. It’s no longer the networks tentpole show. Honestly I don’t see why networks seem to keep resurrecting it but in doing so removing the core elements of what made it Big Brother and dumbing down what’s left.

Us fans know what we want to see and I don’t ever think we’ll be satisfied with what new iterations provide at this rate. The bar has be lowered significantly. I’m making my way though season 7 (which personally I enjoyed during the original run and I’m enjoying again on the rewatch) and what we were given in 2025 just doesn’t even come close. All these years later I’m still engaged, and I know what happens!

I know what I’d like to see in 2026 and I think it’s probably on par with most people here, but the producers showed us last year what they have in mind and that’s honestly (unfortunately) what I expect moving forward. The soul of the show is missing. Funnily enough, I think if they did make more of an effort to return to their true roots many OG viewers would tune back in. A whole section of viewers are being alienated from this reboot. It now appeals to one type of audience. I guarantee many of the day to day viewers from the original run probably tuned into the reboot out of curiosity and probably thought “wtf is this?!” and changed the channel. The same likely happened when it moved to Seven. Hell, we weren’t even given a chance to enjoy the theme tune.
 
I think at the end of the day BB isn’t the ratings powerhouse of yesteryear. It’s no longer the networks tentpole show. Honestly I don’t see why networks seem to keep resurrecting it but in doing so removing the core elements of what made it Big Brother and dumbing down what’s left.

Us fans know what we want to see and I don’t ever think we’ll be satisfied with what new iterations provide at this rate. The bar has be lowered significantly. I’m making my way though season 7 (which personally I enjoyed during the original run and I’m enjoying again on the rewatch) and what we were given in 2025 just doesn’t even come close. All these years later I’m still engaged, and I know what happens!

I know what I’d like to see in 2026 and I think it’s probably on par with most people here, but the producers showed us last year what they have in mind and that’s honestly (unfortunately) what I expect moving forward. The soul of the show is missing. Funnily enough, I think if they did make more of an effort to return to their true roots many OG viewers would tune back in. A whole section of viewers are being alienated from this reboot. It now appeals to one type of audience. I guarantee many of the day to day viewers from the original run probably tuned into the reboot out of curiosity and probably thought “wtf is this?!” and changed the channel. The same likely happened when it moved to Seven. Hell, we weren’t even given a chance to enjoy the theme tune.
I'm still disappointed about no official release of the 2025 main theme.

You clearly got a full remix of the OG theme made. Pay any royalties to allow everyone to enjoy the remix in full.
 
Honestly I don’t see why networks seem to keep resurrecting it but in doing so removing the core elements of what made it Big Brother and dumbing down what’s left.

The short answer is: Because they are stupid.

That answer is oozing with arrogance, but it is the truth (and it's not like they look at us differently). They are in for the money, but they lack the passion for the show. They see that there is an extremely engaged audience, but they are not engaged with that audience, they don't understand that audience and - most importantly - they don't understand the show and in the worst case, don't even care about the show and are only interested in filling TV time.

I'm sure that I've written about before and while it's not BBAU, it's the best example for that mentioned approach: When Germany brought back the civilian version two years ago, they wanted it to be big. They had a press conference and all the higher-ups at the company showed up for the press conference. People that wouldn't even show up for the yearly Celebrity Big Brother press conferences. And they've done such a pathetic job explaining why somebody should watch that show. It became so obvious that none of them will actually watch the show. They've said the most generic things about the show like how it's the original or how it's authentic.

And I think that's true for many countries. They see Big Brother as "cameras filming people in a house and an invisible voice talks to them once in a while and that invisible voice is what sets it apart from other reality shows". And from that point onwards, it's where things go wrong, because the show is so much more than that. Big Brother

Part of the issue is also, that's it's not just TV execs but also execs at Banijay. One of the cool things about Big Brother, for me, has always been how different it looked everywhere. And Banijay is going around and telling people: There is not just one Big Brother, Big Brother can be anything you want it to be. But those two things are not the same. Big Brother might look and slightly work differently everywhere, but in it's core it was the same. It's not true anymore today. Big Brother used to inspire other shows. These days, it's mainly the network's answer to other shows.

And that might work well for Banijay when they try to sell the show. But it's not the key to building a healthy franchise. And Banijay will never admit it, but the Big Brother brand is not in as good of a shape as they think. So many of the current franchises rely on celebrities these days, even in the civilian version. Banijay won't mind, because of money in the short term. I'm sure that they will mind later though.

I think you've said that you worked in production or something before, I think you've seen decisions that were motivated by financial reasons in your job, too. I have a friend that used to work in TV production. She was involved in producing a magazine-type of show for a channel and that was quite successful. They treated her as the queen of daytime. But then somebody did the maths and said that if they switch to sitcom re-runs, they might have less viewers and get less ad-revenue but save a lot of money because re-runs are cheaper... and they calculated how much the ratings could drop and would realistically drop and decided that they're better of with re-runs even though they are less successful. Because money was more important in the short-term. They might regret the decision these days when people would rather watch re-runs on Netflix.

I could rant about it for ages. And it all comes down to: They only see the money and are stupid.
 
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