Celebrity Big Brother ran three seasons in the United States on CBS — February 2018, January 2019 and February 2022. Each was a short, fast version of the regular show, roughly three to four weeks long, played by celebrities for $250,000. Marissa, Tamar and Miesha won them. There has not been a fourth.
- Seasons: three — 2018, 2019 and 2022.
- Winners: Marissa (6–3), Tamar (9–0), Miesha (7–1).
- Prizes: $250,000 to win, $50,000 for second, $25,000 for America’s Favorite.
- Length: around three to four weeks, against roughly a hundred days for a regular season.
- Live feeds: yes — the same feeds as a normal season.
- Host: Julie Chen Moonves, all three.
- Not the UK version. A different show entirely — see below.
How many seasons of Celebrity Big Brother are there?
In the United States, three.
- Celebrity Big Brother 1 — February 2018. Marissa won, beating Ross 6–3. Ross took America’s Favorite.
- Celebrity Big Brother 2 — January to February 2019. Tamar won, beating Ricky 9–0. Tom Green took America’s Favorite.
- Celebrity Big Brother 3 — February 2022. Miesha won, beating Todrick 7–1. Carson took America’s Favorite.
Tamar’s win was the first by a Black houseguest in American Big Brother, and only the second unanimous jury vote the show had ever produced — the first being Dan in Big Brother 10.
Is this the same as the UK Celebrity Big Brother?
No, and confusing the two is the most common mistake made about Celebrity Big Brother.
The British version ran twenty-two celebrity series between 2001 and 2018 — hundreds of housemates, and a completely different format. There, the public votes housemates out. In the American version the houseguests play the standard Big Brother game: Head of Household, nominations, the Power of Veto, an eviction vote inside the house, and a jury deciding the winner at the end.
Exactly one person has appeared in both. Brandi was on the British series in 2017 and the first American season in 2018.
How is Celebrity Big Brother different from the regular show?
Celebrity Big Brother uses the same machinery as a regular season and runs it at roughly four times the speed.
A normal season takes around a hundred days. These took under thirty. Everything that would normally unfold over a week — the Head of Household competition, nominations, the veto, the ceremony, the eviction — got compressed into a couple of days, and the show aired several nights a week to keep up. In 2022 a single Monday carried a live show, an entire Head of Household competition, a nomination ceremony, a veto competition and an eviction.
Two other differences matter. The jury is not sequestered, so evicted celebrities go home to the outside world rather than to a jury house. And there are live feeds — the same round-the-clock cameras as a normal season, which is the main reason the short seasons are worth following at all.
What happened in Celebrity Big Brother 1?
The first American Celebrity Big Brother, in February 2018, was the biggest of the three by a distance. Its premiere drew 7.27 million viewers — the largest Big Brother premiere since Big Brother 13 — and the season averaged just over five million.
Most of that attention arrived with one houseguest. Omarosa had left a job at the White House weeks earlier, and what she said about it on the feeds and in the Diary Room became mainstream news well beyond the reality pages. For a fortnight, Big Brother was in political coverage.
The season also opened with a twist that has never quite been explained. Anthony Scaramucci was announced as a houseguest, entered, and was gone by Day 6 — a planned departure the audience was never let in on. Marissa won it, beating Ross 6–3, and Ross took the America’s Favorite money.
What happened in Celebrity Big Brother 2?
Celebrity Big Brother 2 aired across January and February 2019 and produced the most lopsided finish in the show’s history.
Tamar beat Ricky 9–0. Nobody on that jury voted against her. She had also won the Power of the Publicist, a power she never used, and made the season’s defining move by flipping her vote to keep Kandi and send Joey home instead.
The alliance that ran it was the Bedroom Alliance — Natalie, Lolo, Ricky and Tamar. Alongside it, Tom and Kato had a two-man pact they called Team Fun, which is worth naming correctly because it is frequently described as a larger group. It was the two of them. Tom won America’s Favorite.
What happened in Celebrity Big Brother 3?
Celebrity Big Brother 3, in February 2022, was the smallest and the strangest, and it is the one people argue about.
Miesha won it 7–1 over Todrick, taking four Head of Household competitions and six wins in total — a genuinely dominant run. The single vote against her came from Cynthia, whom she had evicted an hour earlier after winning the final Head of Household.
The alliance was the Formation, and it fell apart in the way these things do. Carson’s Head of Household was the season’s hinge — Todrick turned him against Shanna, and the fallout followed Todrick to the end. Shanna used her jury vote to tell him she would never have to hear his voice again. Carson, who could have joined in, deliberately did not.
It ended oddly too. Todd went out on a Monday double eviction with the best exit line the show has had — Whatchoo talkin’ ’bout, Julie? Carson won America’s Favorite over Shanna and Lamar. And Todrick cancelled his post-finale interviews and did not do them.
Why did the ratings fall so far?
Celebrity Big Brother went from averaging 5.04 million viewers in 2018 to 4.40 million in 2019 to 2.63 million in 2022. Some of that is the show cooling off. A lot of it is the calendar.
Both the 2018 and 2022 seasons were scheduled opposite the Winter Olympics, and in 2022 that was close to total. Of the fourteen episodes that February, the Olympics beat almost every one — the show finished second or third on most nights, fourth on several, and one Sunday it aired against the Super Bowl and drew 1.51 million.
The finale is the number that tells the real story. Once the Olympics were over, it drew 6.94 million viewers — more than double the season average and nearly triple some individual nights. The audience had not gone anywhere. It had been watching ski jumping.
Why did Celebrity Big Brother stop?
No official reason has ever been given for the end of Celebrity Big Brother. It has not been formally cancelled either — it simply has not come back since February 2022.
What is on the record is a producer, asked about it in late 2025, saying it did not look likely and pointing the question at the network. The pandemic accounts for part of the three-year gap between the second and third seasons; nothing accounts for the silence since.
There is also the network context. Julie Chen Moonves is married to the man who chaired CBS when the show launched, and who left the company in September 2018, between the first and second seasons. She kept hosting, and added his name to her on-air credit.