Last Wednesday, we saw that the producers were $50,000 worth of desperate to buy out a houseguest -- any houseguest -- and replace that person with a new, hopefully more interesting resident: sexpot and self-described "bitch" Beth.

No resident would take the $50,000 buy-out offer, and now they have agreed as a group not to take ten times that much. CBS would have loved to have one of them out of the house. All six of them, however, will leave CBS with weeks of six-day-a-week programming to fill. The network could restock the house with a new group of residents, but it's difficult to see how the show could live down the embarrassment.

CBS was looking for the conflict and sex that the European versions of "Big Brother" have provided in spades. Residents regularly bedded each other in those versions; in Germany, one female houseguest regularly bared her breasts for the camera.

Americans, it turns out, are strange when it comes to realilty: They don't boff for the camera. And when it comes down to it, they aren't even in it for the money.

A lot of by-the-numbers opinion pieces about what "Big Brother" said about exhibitionist, shameless America will have to be quietly slid into the bottom of the archives. This group of Americans chose, instead, to bond together against the people who made the rules.

And to lead a strangely polite revolution. They're not walking tonight. They're giving CBS until Wednesday to spin the episode any way they like, hoping CBS will get "World Series ratings" out of their walk-out. (Whether that's remotely possible remains to be seen.)

Eddie put it this way: "We're gonna dick 'em. And if we're gonna dick 'em, they're gonna need a little lubrication."

Meanwhile, his more idealistic housemates think this could be CBS's way of giving back to America, by showing people making a decision based on higher principles than greed.

No, they really do.

Cassandra, the African-American United Nations worker who has maintained her dignity and her awareness of the cameras at all costs, brought up the "Karen Springer Show", a Big-Brother assigned skit in which everyone was given a very undignified role to play. She's been arguing with the "Big Brother" producers, in the Red Room, ever since then that they must be more respectful of her situation.

Jamie, the Washington state beauty queen, said it was by deciding to walk away from Jerry Springer-dom that Oprah Winfrey has become "an icon."

Josh, the self-described genius who vouchsafed the secret of the outside pro-George campaign, displays relief at every turn. He says the premise of the show is that a group of people become closer, like a family -- and then have to turn on each other and vote each other out, all out of greed.

"We don't have to be on that downward spiral of greed," he says.

The "Big Brother" housemates, media-savvy, are determined not to be Darva Conger.

Curtis the quiet lawyer and Eddie, the athlete who lost a leg to cancer at 12, are more pragmatic. They just mean to leave CBS with something they can spin for positive ratings: a little lube.

Surely the show's creator, Paul Romer, has heard his beeper go off a thousand times today. The U.S. producers are spinning their wheels -- thinking, presumably, making phone calls, doing calculations. The houseguests have stopped following instructions, selectively: They'll adjust their microphones when asked, but they won't go inside when Big Brother instructs them to.

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