Big Brother has run an All-Stars season twice: Big Brother 7 in 2006 and Big Brother 22 in 2020. Boogie won the first, Cody won the second, and the two are remembered about as differently as two seasons of the same show can be.
- Seasons: two — Big Brother 7 (2006) and Big Brother 22 (2020).
- Winners: Boogie, 6–1 over Erika. Cody, 9–0 over Enzo.
- Cast size: 14 in 2006, 16 in 2020.
- How they were picked: 2006 was part audience vote. 2020 was production’s choice.
- America’s Favorite: Janelle in 2006, with $25,000. Da’Vonne in 2020.
- A third season: never announced.
How many All-Stars seasons have there been?
Two, fourteen years apart. Nothing else the show has done counts — returning players have appeared in plenty of regular seasons, but only twice has the entire cast been made up of them.
Big Brother 7: All-Stars (2006)
Fourteen players from the first six seasons. Boogie won it, beating Erika 6–1 — Marcellas cast the only vote against him.
The finishing order, first to last: Boogie, Erika, Janelle, Will, George, Danielle, James, Howie, Marcellas, Kaysar, Diane, Jase, Nakomis, Alison.
Janelle took America’s Favorite and the $25,000 that came with it — which, given she finished third and was the season’s strongest competitor, reads as the audience correcting the result.
The season the audience helped cast
This is the part worth knowing, and it is the single biggest difference between the two All-Stars seasons.
In 2006 the show put up twenty former houseguests and let the public vote. Eight of the fourteen were chosen by the audience. Production filled the remaining six.
That is why the 2006 cast feels like a fan wish-list and the 2020 cast does not. One was partly assembled by the people watching. The other was assembled entirely by the people making it.
Chilltown, the Season 6 bloc, and the Legion of Doom
Two alliances defined the season and a third name got attached to whoever was winning.
Chilltown was Will and Boogie, reunited from Big Brother 2, and it is the reason the season is remembered. They went the distance by being openly untrustworthy and somehow never being the target.
Against them sat the Season 6 bloc — Janelle, Howie, Kaysar and James, carrying an alliance over from the previous summer. Season 6 had been the best-liked cast in years, and a large part of the audience came into All-Stars wanting them to win. They did not.
By August the group running the house was being called the Legion of Doom, and coverage at the time used the name without needing to explain it. Their run peaked in a double eviction week: Marcellas went on the Thursday, George took the Head of Household and nominated James and Erika, James won the veto and saved himself, and Howie went up in his place and was voted out 3–2 the same night. Boogie then won the next Head of Household, a competition called Pie in the Eye, before anyone had finished processing it.
The Coup d’État nobody used
Big Brother 7 had a secret power in it, and almost nothing happened with it.
The Coup d’État was hidden in a series of clues released across the season, and feed watchers spent weeks working out who had it. By 11 August they had their answer, from the houseguests themselves: Marcellas told Danielle that at least the thing she had won might help her, Danielle said she had guessed at it, and that was that — the house knew and the feeds knew.
She never used it. A power capable of overturning a week of nominations sat in the house, got solved by the audience before the broadcast caught up, and expired.
Big Brother 22: All-Stars (2020)
Sixteen players, cast entirely by production, filmed under COVID protocols that kept the house sealed tighter than usual.
Cody won it 9–0 over Enzo — a unanimous jury, which tells you most of what you need to know about how the season went. Da’Vonne took America’s Favorite.
The season’s twists were the Safety Suite, the BB Basement powers, and the BB Neighbor. It also ran a triple eviction on 1 October — the first in the regular US series, though not the first in the wider Big Brother franchise, which had done it five years earlier.
The Committee
One alliance ran Big Brother 22 from early on and never stopped, and it is the reason the season has the reputation it has.
The Committee did not need to win to control the house. Across the whole season the group lost all but two competitions — and still picked off everyone outside it, one at a time, without ever being seriously threatened. Power kept changing hands and kept landing in the same place.
That is what a 9–0 final vote looks like from the inside. By the end there was nobody left who had played a different game.
Why the two seasons are remembered so differently
Big Brother 7 sits near the top of most fan rankings. Big Brother 22 sits near the bottom of nearly all of them.
The usual explanation is the one above: a season where two open liars talked their way through a house that knew exactly what they were, against a season where a large alliance formed early and the result stopped being in doubt. Predictability is the complaint that comes up most.
It was not only the game. Big Brother 22 had a serious incident on the live feeds in September 2020, when houseguests were recorded mocking Ian for behaviours connected to his autism. It played out on the feeds rather than off them, which is how it reached people outside the show, and it shaped how the season was discussed from that point on.
Kaysar, a Big Brother 7 player watching the 2020 season, summed up the fan view in three words when he said the cast all suck. It got quoted a great deal.
Will there be a third All-Stars?
Nothing has been announced.
Returning players keep appearing in regular seasons, and the show has run all-returnee formats in its spin-offs, but a third full All-Stars has never been confirmed or scheduled. Fans propose casts for it constantly. That is as far as it has ever got.