Big Brother: Over the Top was an online-only season that ran in autumn 2016, streaming on CBS All Access with no broadcast episodes at all. It lasted 65 days, had 13 houseguests, and handed the audience more power than any season before or since — America voted in every eviction and chose the winner outright. Morgan won it. There has never been a second one.
- When: 28 September to 1 December 2016. 65 days.
- Where: CBS All Access, online only. No episodes on television.
- Houseguests: 13, all new to the show.
- Winner: Morgan, $250,000. Jason second, $25,000.
- No jury. America voted for the winner.
- America’s power: nominated a third houseguest every week and cast an extra eviction vote alongside the house.
- Second season: never happened.
What was Big Brother: Over the Top?
Big Brother: Over the Top was an experiment: a full season of Big Brother made for the internet, with no broadcast component whatsoever. If you did not subscribe, you did not see it.
It started exactly one week after Big Brother 18 ended. Nicole won on 21 September 2016; a new house opened on the 28th. Nobody had time to be ready for it, including the people covering it — feed watchers writing on launch day said plainly that they still were not sure how any of it was going to work.
That confusion is worth remembering, because it turned out to be the season’s biggest problem. The format was genuinely good. Almost nobody found it.
How did America’s vote work in Over the Top?
America’s vote in Big Brother: Over the Top is the thing most summaries of the season get wrong, so it is worth stating precisely.
America did not replace the house vote. The houseguests still voted to evict, exactly as they always have. America simply cast one additional vote on top of theirs — a single extra ballot that could tie or break a week.
America also nominated a third houseguest every week, alongside the two the Head of Household put up. Three people on the block every single week, one of them chosen by the audience.
And at the end there was no jury at all. The evicted houseguests did not decide the winner. America did, by vote. That is the single biggest structural difference between this and every other season of the American show.
What were the Care Packages?
The Care Packages were how America handed out power in Big Brother: Over the Top, and they ran all season — eight of them, each voted on by the audience and given to one houseguest.
- Save-A-Friend — pull someone off the block.
- Pick-A-Veto — which became the Double Veto in Week 3.
- Safety Servant — safety, at a price.
- Eliminate Three Eviction Votes — wipe three votes off the board.
- Co-HOH — a second Head of Household, sharing the power.
- Double Eviction Veto — immunity, plus a veto to use on one other person.
Week 3 is the one people forget. The Care Package produced a double veto — both Justin and Alex ended up holding veto power in the same week. Justin used his to save Kryssie. Alex chose not to use hers at all.
Put the Care Packages together with the third nomination and the extra eviction vote and the shape of the season becomes clear: the audience was not commenting on this game, it was playing it.
What was the first competition in Over the Top?
The first Head of Household competition in Big Brother: Over the Top took a full day and was, by some distance, the strangest opening the show has ever run.
The houseguests came in from an outdoor lockdown to find a blue bottle on the living room table with a card reading only one may drink. After several minutes of nobody moving, Shane cracked the seal and drank it. Fifteen minutes in the Diary Room later he came out wearing an “infected” shirt.
The rules were simple and horrible. A buzzer sounds. Whoever is infected has to pass it to somebody else. That person waits for the next buzzer and passes it on. The last houseguest never infected becomes Head of Household. The house started calling it the crabs almost immediately.
It went round the house in order — Shane to Danielle, Danielle to Justin, then Shelby, Scott, Neely, Kryssie, Morgan, Cornbread, Jason, Whitney, and finally Alex, leaving Monte as the first Head of Household. He had spent the day telling people he was not going to bother unpacking because he knew he would win it.
Two things about it are pure Over the Top. It paused for thirteen or fourteen hours overnight, because it was too early in the season to wake anybody up. And the excitement wore off fast — by the middle rounds nobody was getting out of their chair, and houseguests were asking for volunteers rather than picking targets. Kryssie took one that way, then told the room that if she had met them at a party she would not have talked to ninety percent of them.
Which alliances ran Big Brother: Over the Top?
Big Brother: Over the Top split almost perfectly in two, and stayed split.
The Ball Smashers were Alex, Morgan, Shelby and Whitney. Shelby gave them the definition herself when the house tried to lump them in with Scott: they were the Ball Smashers, she said, not Scott and his pythons.
Against them, the Late Night Jamboree — Jason, Justin, Kryssie, Danielle, Neeley and Shane. It arrived at that name the long way round, starting as the OTT Jamboree, passing through something the house called the Midnight Jamboree social club, and settling as the Late Night Jamboree once the sides had hardened.
Scott spent the season between them, useful to both and trusted by neither. Whitney went the other way and actually crossed — she began with the Ball Smashers, worked both sides, and ended up inside the Jamboree, which is a rarer move than it sounds in a house this evenly divided.
How did houseguests campaign to America?
Because America voted in Big Brother: Over the Top, the houseguests could campaign to the audience directly — and the live Diary Rooms gave them a microphone to do it with. No other season has worked this way.
They used it exactly as you would expect. In one live Diary Room, Danielle told America outright that her side were the Late Night Jamboree and the underdogs, on the reasoning that it would make people root for them. Over on the other side, the same sessions were being used to swear loyalty on camera — Whitney, Alex, Shelby and Morgan each telling the audience they were loyal to the Ball Smashers, in the same hour, while privately holding different positions.
Strategy also ran the other way. Viewers worked out that they could use their vote against someone’s ally rather than against the person they disliked — a chunk of the vote that took Neeley out was aimed at hurting Kryssie rather than Neeley. Give an audience a real vote and they will play the game too.
What was the Safety Ceremony?
The Safety Ceremony was Big Brother: Over the Top’s replacement for the nomination ceremony, and it ran backwards from the version everyone knows.
Instead of naming who was going on the block, the Head of Household named who was safe, one at a time, in order. Whoever was left standing at the end was nominated. Danielle’s ceremony went exactly like that — she saved Scott, then Morgan, then Alex, and Shelby and Whitney were nominated by default.
It is a small change that does a lot. Naming two enemies is one decision; naming your friends one by one while the rest of the room works out where they stand is several, in public, and the house read every pause.
How was the schedule different?
Big Brother: Over the Top had no Sunday, Wednesday and Thursday pattern, because it had no episodes. What it had instead was the feeds, running constantly, with scheduled moments layered on top.
- Competitions played out live on the feeds. No blackout, no edit, no waiting for broadcast.
- Live Diary Rooms on Tuesdays and Fridays — houseguests talking to the audience in real time.
- A weekly live show with the eviction and a Q&A with whoever had just gone.
- A nightly recap, narrated by the voice of Big Brother. The first one ran seven minutes.
For a feed watcher this was close to ideal — the blackouts that define every other season simply were not there. For anyone used to watching Big Brother on television, there was nothing to watch.
How did Morgan win Over the Top?
Morgan took Big Brother: Over the Top and the $250,000 that came with it. Jason finished second with $25,000, and Kryssie was the third finalist.
The final was a public vote rather than a jury, which made it a popularity contest in the most literal sense — no speeches to win over the people who had been evicted, no jury management, just whoever the audience preferred.
It was closer than the format suggests. Jason was widely described afterwards as having come within around twenty thousand votes. Whether that figure was the final margin or the narrowest point during voting has never been made entirely clear, so treat it as the shape of the result rather than an exact number.
The alliances that carried the season were the Late Night Jamboree on one side and the Ball Smashers on the other, with Morgan on the winning end of it.
Does Over the Top count as a real Big Brother season?
Whether Big Brother: Over the Top counts as a real season is still argued about, and the argument usually comes down to visibility rather than quality.
Big Brother: Over the Top is frequently left out of season rankings altogether, and is not given a number the way the broadcast seasons are. No houseguest from it has ever returned to a numbered American season. For a show that recycles players constantly, that is a telling absence.
The counter-argument is that it was a full season with a full cast, a full format, a $250,000 prize and sixty-five days of feeds, and it is only excluded because far fewer people watched it. The people who did watch it tend to rate it well.
Why was there never a second Over the Top?
No second season of Big Brother: Over the Top was ever ordered, and no official reason was given for dropping it.
What is on the record is an executive saying afterwards that they were looking at what to do next — which is the sort of thing said about a project that has not been renewed and is not being cancelled out loud either. Nothing came of it. CBS All Access became Paramount+ and the format was never used again.
Finding it now is difficult. It has drifted in and out of streaming availability and there is no reliable way to watch it in full, which is a strange fate for a season that was, for sixty-five days, the most watchable version of this show anyone had made.