No, you didn't miss an episode. CBS just didn't want to let you know that its much-hyped reality series was on the verge of an abrupt and unscripted end.

Love it, hate it or be uncomfortably compelled by it, the one thing most people have been taking for granted about "Big Brother" is that, contrived as the situation may be, what we see on the screen is what is really happening.

In fact, the producers of the show must distill dozens of hours of potentially airable footage down to about 22 minutes of programming each day. (The show is generally on six nights a week.) It's a formidable editing challenge -- ideally, the producers are boiling down hours of happenstance into minutes of television that must be both interesting and true.

This is all nothing different from what television news reports do -- edit footage and rearrange it where necessary to make the program coherent and entertaining.

But "Big Brother" is giving us a rare opportunity to see exactly what decisions are being made. CBS has set up a 24-hour-a-day real-time webcast that lets us watch the story as it unfolds. On the Web you can see any of four live feeds from the house. (Devotees have learned how to find a feed from the control room, one from the chicken coop and one that shows all four house feeds at once.)

The only thing the webcast doesn't show is what the housemates say in the "Red Room," where they talk privately to show producers.

The result is an unprecedented opportunity to see how editing changes reality.

And the evidence isn't pretty.

There is constant distortion of events. Crucial information -- information that would change a reasonable person's interpretation of an event -- is withheld from viewers. And a lot of inherently interesting developments, like the unease that led to the unlikely evolution of George into a revolutionary, are simply being suppressed.

I've been watching the Web feeds with some regularity since the show started, and taking notes since the first week. My very first note: "Lawyer: 'If you edit it right, everything we do could look thrilling.'" That was Curtis, the understatedly intelligent 28-year-old attorney, talking.

Since he said that, I've seen that "Big Brother" can also edit it wrong. If the producers want to, anything the residents do can be made to look like something other than it was -- or be as obliterated from history as the archival news stories Winston Smith rewrote for the original Big Brother.

Especially, it seems, if it might make Big Brother look bad.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

On Aug. 14, Big Brother, in one of its many disembodied voices, had told the housemates they were commanded to put on a comedy roast. The producers offer up one of these commands -- they call them "challenges" -- every day or so. It's rarely made explicit on the television broadcast that the housemates are doing something they were told to do instead of something they spontaneously decided on.

So, for example, on a recent show, the announcer said, "The houseguests cool off with a game of water basketball." The voice doesn't explain that the residents were ordered to do so; it also doesn't explain that some of the residents don't like the pool. Cassandra has been in the pool exactly twice, both on demand. When her recently dreaded hair gets wet, it takes her much of a frustrating day to fix it again.

On television, the roast was made to look like the housemates' idea. The AOL-sponsored Web site is considerably less coy: If you read it, you can find out that the residents didn't come up with the idea or the jokes. Two weeks earlier, they'd had an identical challenge to roast nominees Jordan and Curtis with canned jokes, and resisted; the jokes had been milder than expected, so this time the housemates were more comfortable.

Then they saw the material.

None of the jokes were particularly funny, and several in particular shook the housemates. In one joke, the regal Cassandra, who had remarked once that she hadn't dated the previous year, was lumped with avowed 25-year-old virgin Brittany: "I guess technically, there are two virgins in the house."

Now playing: Read all the recent movie reviews by Salon's critics