OTEV

Late in a Big Brother season something enormous appears in the backyard and starts shouting at the houseguests. It is a different creature every year, it knows everything they have done since move-in day, and it makes them crawl through slime to prove they were paying attention. Its name is VETO spelled backwards.

• Debut: Big Brother 9, April 4, 2008, as OTEV the Great & Powerful Rhyming Rain God.
• Seasons: Every season since BB11. BB10 is the only skip after the debut.
• What it is: A Power of Veto competition. It has never been anything else.
• The name: OTEV is VETO backwards.
• Who voices him: A different person most years. Four have been identified; the rest never have.
• The catch: It looks like a mudslide. It’s a memory test.

What Is OTEV?

OTEV is a Power of Veto competition and the character who runs it — an oversized creature installed at the top of the backyard, given a new persona and an alliterative name every season, who insults the players while they compete in front of him.

The shape of it has barely moved since 2008. OTEV gives a clue. The houseguests scramble down a slippery slope to find the object that answers it, then race back up. There are always fewer places to return to than there are players. Whoever comes back with the wrong item, or the right one too late, is out. Then he does it again with one fewer player, until somebody is holding the veto.

The clues are about the season itself — who said what, who won what, which day something happened. That is the whole trick of the competition, and it is why players start studying the moment they suspect he’s coming. It looks like a mudslide and it is really a pop quiz with a costume on.

The earliest description anybody wrote of it is still the best one. In August 2008 a feed watcher explained it to a newcomer in a comment thread: a big stone idol with a deep voice, asking questions in a smoky backyard, with the players racing back to kneel on a dwindling number of mats and hope they got it right.

How many rounds

Five is normal. There is no rule saying so, and there is no rule saying one player goes out per round either — that is just what usually happens. What actually eliminates you is a wrong answer or a slow return, and if enough people get it wrong at once, the whole thing collapses early.

Big Brother 26 is the extreme case. Five of the six players answered the opening clue wrong, Makensy answered it right, and the competition was over in a single round. Big Brother 27 went three rounds when Rachel, Mickey and Morgan all came back wrong
together. Big Brother 28 went four from six, because round two took out Dee and Haley at the same time — the clearest illustration yet that nothing in the format guarantees one elimination per round. Three seasons running, the most elaborate set of the summer has come in under five.

When it happens

OTEV is described almost everywhere as a final-six or final-seven competition. That was true once and it has not been true for a decade.

From BB9 through BB15 it landed with five to eight players left. From BB16 onward it has landed with nine to thirteen. It moved earlier in the season and it stayed there. If you are a houseguest waiting for OTEV at final six, you have probably already played it.

Who Voices OTEV?

This is the question people actually arrive looking for, and unlike Zingbot — where the answer really is nobody knows — OTEV has partial answers. The reason is that OTEV isn’t a fixed character. The voice changes to suit the animal, sometimes drastically, so the show has been hiring for it over and over, and a few of those hires have talked.

The four we know

• Big Brother 11 — Casey Turner. The banana-suit guy, evicted in week three, brought back to voice the ape that ran the veto for the people who evicted him. Feed watchers at the time were careful about it — the wording was that Casey “was involved” and that it sounded like pre-recorded comments — but the show threads that night are full of viewers recognising his voice.
• Big Brother 13 — Clayton Halsey. The show’s longtime announcer. A contemporary recap named him as the Sweet Toothed Shark, and in 2016 Halsey confirmed in an interview that he had voiced OTEV in past seasons — without saying which ones.
• Big Brother 16 — Gilbert Gottfried. The only celebrity casting ever confirmed. Gottfried posted about voicing “OTEV The Penguin” himself on the day it aired, and it appears in his filmography.
• Big Brother 23 — Joe Gaudet. The jellyfish. Gaudet said so himself: “Had a lot of fun voicing OTEV last night on Season 23 of Big Brother.”

The Schwarzenegger thing

Big Brother 23’s jellyfish spoke in an Arnold Schwarzenegger accent so committed that a chunk of the audience assumed they were hearing the actual Arnold Schwarzenegger. They were not. It was Joe Gaudet doing an impression, and he later joked about the confusion himself. This is the one OTEV voice rumour that is not merely unproven but actively settled.

Three other names circulate and none of them hold up. Producer Chris DeJoseph, You Don’t Know Jack‘s Tom Gottlieb for the BB20 skunk, and Michael DeLuise for the BB26 trash panda are all fan guesses based on a voice sounding a bit like somebody. No source supports any of them.

Halsey’s 2016 comment is the useful one, because it tells you the shape of the thing: he voiced OTEV “in the past,” and production later moved toward bigger names. So the honest position is that OTEV has been performed by a rotating cast of at least half a dozen people, four of whom we can name, and CBS has never once put it in the credits.

The Debut: April 4, 2008

OTEV arrived in Big Brother 9 — the winter season, the one nobody defends — as OTEV the Great & Powerful Rhyming Rain God. The competition was a day-count quiz: OTEV asked which day of the season a given event had happened, and whoever guessed furthest from the truth went home empty-handed.

Not everyone was impressed on arrival. a write-up that week called it a rerun of the voodoo-doll competition from Big Brother 7, unfortunately missing the dolls and the harm.

But something happened in that first competition that has never been written up anywhere else.

OTEV got the answers wrong

Went back through the day count afterwards and found that CBS had been running a faulty answer key.

One round asked which day the couples had split. That happened on Day 27. OTEV said Day 28. James guessed 24 and was eliminated — no harm done, since he was furthest out either way.

The round after that asked which day Evel Dick had shown up. That happened on Day 43. Sharon guessed 43. OTEV said the answer was 44, so Adam and Ryan — who had both guessed 44 — advanced, and Sharon was eliminated for being correct.

Filed the whole thing under Allison Grodner’s much-repeated phrase about the integrity of the game, and then — three weeks later, once James was actually gone — went back and wrote about it again. That second piece is the sharper one: “None of it comes down to who would or wouldn’t like James to live another week: it’s about the ‘integrity of the game’, a phrase Allison Grodner uses freely and often, and something she swears to uphold.”

Eighteen years on it remains the only documented case of an OTEV competition being decided on a wrong answer. It happened the first time OTEV was ever played.

Before he had a name

Two earlier competitions ran the same format without the character. Big Brother 7’s Voo Doo Dolls in August 2006 had the All-Stars answering questions about former houseguests and hunting for the matching doll — Janelle won it, after she and James physically wrestled over one. Big Brother 8’s Cat Scratch Veto in August 2007 did the same thing with a cat; Eric won.

Both are routinely folded into the OTEV lineage in retrospectives. We’d rather be precise about it: the format is older than the character, and neither of those competitions has a contemporaneous source calling the creature OTEV. The name arrives with the Rain God in 2008.

Then he skipped a year. Big Brother 10 fans spent that August speculating in the comments about whether “the Great Otev” was coming back. He wasn’t. It is the only completed season since the debut without one.

Every OTEV Persona and Winner

House date first, broadcast date second where they differ — feed watchers always know first. Names are given as CBS announced them where a CBS source exists, and as the live feeds recorded them where one doesn’t.

Big Brother 1 through 8 had no OTEV, though BB7 and BB8 ran the format. He has appeared in every completed season since BB11.

Four names people get wrong

• BB18 is the Dopest DJ, not the Dope DJ. Most listings say Dope. The contemporaneous feed coverage wrote Dopest three separate times, including alongside the veto player list. No CBS wording for that season has ever surfaced, so the version written down at the time wins.
• BB24 is the Singin’ Stage Roach. Three words, apostrophe, from CBS’s own announcement. “Singing Stageroach” is a later tidy-up.
• BB27 is the Hogfather, one word. The broadcast says it wrote it that way the night it happened. “Hog Father” is a wiki rendering.
• BB28 is the Belligerent B-Movie Blob, not the Slob.

And two that were never real: OTEV the Ranting Racehorse and OTEV the Buffoonery Baboon are both jokes made in her write-ups, not personas. They have started turning up in lists anyway.

What OTEV Actually Says

The feeds are almost always down during the competition, so the broadcast is the record for OTEV’s dialogue. These are lines we can tie to a season. He is not a character with a catchphrase — there is no OTEV equivalent of ZING! — but he does have a consistent job, which is to be as rude as a family network will allow while people fall over in front of him.

The clues

People assume the clues rhyme. Sometimes they do. The only real constant is that OTEV describes something from the current season without handing over the answer, and that the wording and the physical object get dressed to match whatever he is that year.

• BB12 sang Broadway-ish numbers describing two evicted houseguests at once, and the answer was a CD with the names welded together — Monett for Monet and Matt, Mathy for Matt and Kathy.
• BB13 used prose riddles and pies: “Round one, I am hungry for the tasty pie who was no chum of Daniele’s and called her Judas on the live show.”
• BB17 sang every clue. “From L.A. to Atlanta… this boy shouted oh, Mylanta” pointed at Jason. The answers were sticks of butter.
• BB19 abandoned names entirely and asked for numbers: “Round one, bring me the number of soles who competed in Bowlerina.” Souls, soles — the pun was doing a lot of work.
• BB21 described competitions without naming them, and you fetched the title. A clue about kayaking rapids in nine seconds wanted Time Me a River.
• BB26 asked which male houseguest hadn’t played in the opening HOH. The answer was Cedric. Five people said Tucker.

Who Builds OTEV?

The Big Brother house has a production designer, Scott Storey, who has run it since 2005. The competitions are not his, and he has said so on the record.

Narbeh Nazarian has been credited as Big Brother’s competition production designer since 2006 — hundreds of episodes, and the entire span of OTEV’s existence. Whoever built the clam, the penguin, the jellyfish and the Hogfather worked in his department. Storey described the competition operation as enormous and getting bigger every season, built back to back to back with no gap between them.

There is exactly one credit anywhere that names a person against the character rather than the department. The Big Brother 25 episode credits list Spenser Williamson — puppeteer: Otev. That is the whole of it, for eighteen years and eighteen builds.

It also settles a small thing people get wrong: nobody is inside OTEV. He is described in the trade press as an animatronic, he has at least one credited puppeteer, and there is no evidence anyone has ever climbed in and worn him. That is the opposite of Zingbot, where there is definitely a person in the suit and definitely not the person speaking.

Nola Roller is credited as competition wardrobe and costume designer from 2019 to 2022 — the pigeon, the salamander, the jellyfish and the roach — though no source ties her to any individual OTEV build.

None of them has ever given an interview about the work. No podcast, no trade press, no portfolio case study. The closest anyone has come is Allison Grodner, talking to Entertainment Weekly about Big Brother 26 — where production built the entire set, spent the money, and watched five of six players get the first question wrong and end the competition on the spot.

Nobody has ever been asked who writes the clues, either. For a character who has been shouting at houseguests for eighteen years, the people who make him have never once been interviewed about it.

When OTEV Goes Wrong

It is a physical competition run at speed on a greased ramp, in a Los Angeles August, by people who have not slept properly in two months. It goes wrong regularly.

What has never happened, in eighteen years: an OTEV competition being stopped, restarted, replayed or overturned. Not the BB20 answer-sharing, not BB26’s five-way wipeout, not BB27’s triple elimination. Whatever happens out there, the result stands.

The OTEV Curse

For twelve years, nobody who won OTEV won the season. Players knew about it and it genuinely spooked them. Big Brother 22, on the feeds, Tyler to the room: “Don’t tell Cody but there is a curse. No one that has won OTEV has ever won the game.”

Cody won it anyway, and then won Big Brother 22, and the curse died on the spot. It is the sort of thing that only exists because a competition has been running long enough for fans to build a mythology around it, which is the real point — OTEV has been around long enough to have superstitions attached to it.

Houseguests are split on the competition itself. Janelle, asked to choose between this and Zingbot: “OTEV! It’s one of my favorite comps. I think it’s so fun.” Taylor picked Zingbot, with a warning — “the cards will cut your hands.” Lauren, after winning it in Big Brother 27: “OTEV was one of my like bucket list ones so I was really excited.”

And then there is Ragan, who lost the Broadway Clam in Big Brother 12 and never got over it. He told the Diary Room the night before that he had no chance, and afterwards, arguing that the endgame competitions should reward real knowledge: “it’s gonna be applying knowledge in a way that’s beyond the bullsh*t OTEV ‘go find these 2 names’.”

OTEV and Zingbot

Big Brother has two recurring characters whose job is to torment the houseguests, and for fifteen years they stayed in their own lanes. Zingbot arrives mid-season to insult everybody and leave. OTEV arrives later and runs a competition. They have shared plenty of seasons — Adam was singing about being zinged and feeding OTEV back in Big Brother 13 — but never a scene.

Big Brother 25 merged them. The Scrambleverse twist produced OTEV the Zinging Robot: Zingbot wearing OTEV’s job, delivering zings inside an OTEV competition. Jag won it. It remains the only time the two have been combined.

OTEV is also the older of the two by two years. He debuted in April 2008. Zingbot didn’t turn up until August 2010.