Sorry Starry but this forum is for people who realise Big Brother is a 24/7 experience. It will be down to you to avoid this thread if you want to watch the episodes without knowing the game play as it's just not in the forums interest to disrupt the flow of conversation here by having so many posts hidden under spoiler tags. Had this come up earlier in the season it would be fair enough to split into discussion for live feed/episodes (indeed I nearly did) but with just over a week to go it's not really worth it now.
I never said the show wasn't about the live feed, I said there were two different audiences and so needed two threads from the start (don't really get why you didn't do that at the start). I'd love it if they could be bothered to actually link in the episodes to the live feed much better and so have one audience. For instance the AU version used to have Friday Night Live which was a competition that gave an advantage, but it was live for all the audience and so didn't stick two fingers up at everyone like the US/CAN version does.
This version of BB isn't shown 24/7, blackouts are common for any moments of drama like competitions, nominations, twists and the final week. It copies the US version where people seem to be happy just having the information by hearsay, which I think represents more the spoiler culture there of people wanting to know what will be shown in advance, though people pay quite a lot for the live feed in the US just to get that. But that isn't the original view of Big Brother where you see everything, it's a version where all the audience including the live feed one is manipulated. To what purpose though? Obviously nobody can watch all the live feed, though I'm not sure those who follow it are just about to watch episodes to see a competition they already know the result of.
The only thing actually shown to both audiences together are the evictions and they are normally nowhere near as dramatic as the public vote version. Normally everybody in the house knows the vote and it's easy to be spoiled on who's likely to go anyway. The pleas before the eviction often give it away in advance too. The votes in the DR just feel like going through the motions. Ridiculously this is the only time when both audiences are up to pace and it could only be for a very short time if they do the HoH straight away anyway.
So what exactly is the point of the episodes? Most of the audience rely on them, and they are strung along with stupid 'cliffhangers' when it should be possible to show the result of a competition live, they even have the extra show where that could be done as well. The recent episode could have covered the veto, we were told both at the start and end of the episode that Tim or Cass had to win the veto but all it built up to was the predictable nominations. And they wheeled in Gary for some awards who was just a walking cliche in his year anyway. Everyone is the house has to act like he's amazing of course.
The producers try to create their own storyline in the episodes (no different to other supposedly real BBs), but when people can point out how ridiculous it is compared to what actually happens it's kind of stupid. So all this stuff about Joel never playing the other side and being just unfortunate in how things turned out. The producers just try and play the audience for fools.
Overall I think the US version is better, because they tend to have fewer dull characters, the gameplay is slightly more intense (couples are given more of a bye in the Canadian BB), and it's the original version. That doesn't take away any of the big faults of this version of BB though, which if brought to Australia would no doubt be just another carbon copy of this.
One of the biggest ironies for me has always been that live feed is actually by far the most important for the public vote version, as the audience have a say every week and need to see what actually happens. And yet that version of BB is the one that cancelled the live feed (in the UK and Australia).