‘Big Brother’ Season 22 Will Run A ‘Similar Length’ As Previous Games
The rule book has been thrown out for Season 22 of Big Brother. The ongoing coronavirus health crisis has affected everything with the popular CBS reality program, most obviously its production timeline. The show would have been well into its season by now, as the series traditionally starts at the beginning of July each year. Big Brother runs for 99 days, with only three houseguests making it that far as others are evicted along the way.
With All-Stars starting a month behind a normal schedule, many were wondering what this meant for the length of the series this time around. Big Brother will now insert itself in CBS’s fall schedule, which could mess with some of its regularly scheduled programming. Big Brother also airs three times a week, which would dramatically change the latter part of this year’s television line-up. Longtime producer Allison Grodner caught up with Entertainment Weekly on Friday to discuss the length of this unprecedented season, giving just a shred of clarity.
“We have a target [end] date. I don’t know if that’s been revealed yet, but I expect that this is a regular date for a Big Brother season. That means we’ll be saying summer for a bit, and then probably, you know, having to transition into, ‘Hey, welcome to Big Brother fall!’ It is playing a similar length of game. So yeah, expect that the weather may change a little bit, although this is California. So I don’t know if you’ll notice it that much,” she said.
Grodner did confirm the show will push into fall programming, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be a problem for CBS. The pandemic has halted production on numerous shows across all networks, meaning there isn’t as much content to go around later this year than there normally would be. Big Brother’s extra episodes might be a welcome addition to the programming if the network is struggling to put fresh shows out.
Whether it will run for 99 days remains to be seen. For now, the only information the network has given regarding its schedule for the series is that it will air on Sundays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. Occasionally, special Friday episodes have often been thrown in during past seasons, and that’s likely to happen for All-Stars as well. The 99-day run time would put the finale of All-Stars on November 12, a far cry from the September dates the finales normally land on.
