Oh, "Big Brother"

English: Julie Chen and Les Moonves at the Vanity Fair celebration for the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

"Big Brother", a reality competition TV show CBS promotes as lightweight summer entertainment, got some unwanted publicity.  Three of its contestants are in hot water for uttering racist and sexist comments live on the air, and two of them have been fired from their day jobs.  Until recently, the network declined to address this matter either to the contestants or the viewers, and they've taken serious heat for this.  But it's better late than never.

We'll talk more about this later.  But first . . .

"Big Brother" is a European import that's been running the American version on CBS since 2000, and is currently in its 15th season.  It takes 16 strangers (known as "houseguests")--mostly of the young and beautiful variety with the occasional minority, middle aged person and gay/lesbian contestant thrown in--and moves them into a specially-designed "house" with cameras, microphones and one-way mirrors everywhere, cut off from the real world.  The last one to survive weeks of backstabbing, "showmances", silly games and other assorted drama wins a half-million dollars.

Julie Chen, who used to be a CBS morning news anchor, has hosted "Big Brother" from the beginning.  Her husband is President and CEO Les Moonves, who has guided the network to the top of the broadcast TV heap for more than a decade.  Which means that as long as Chen remains married to Moonves, she'll always have a job at CBS.  Right now, her other gig is co-hosting "The Talk", the network's daytime ripoff of ABC's "The View".

Now back to our story.  The three houseguests made their allegedly racist and homophobic comments on the live feed that runs 24/7 on CBS' website.  Two of  the women have been fired from their jobs outside of the show (for the record, they were for a modeling agency and as a pageant coordinator), and the other's employment status is pending.

Since the 16 original contestants entered the "Big Brother" house, they are cut off from the outside world.  No TV, no Internet, no smartphone.  It's also possible that they could not have known about Paula Deen's career implosion, caused by her alleged use of the N word decades ago.

Some people would like to see the offending houseguests booted off of "Big Brother".  It's not likely that it will happen before the show concludes its run in September, because once the other houseguests vote to evict them, some of them will remain sequestered to serve as a jury to determine the show's eventual winner.

In reality television, producers don't look for solid citizens.  Instead, they want people with outsized personalities and good looks who could shake things up.  They do conduct background checks, but sometimes let things slide with disastrous results.  It's all about goosing up the ratings.  The more controversial the contestant, the better the network and its advertisers like it.

So what's a couple of people who say nasty things about gays and minorities?  For a show that's struggling in the ratings as "Big Brother" is, you can't buy this kind of publicity.  Now all they have to do is to stem the tide of viewers spending more of their time outdoors, instead of watching a bunch of pretty and obnoxious people hamming it up in a closed environment.