The odd story began Saturday morning when George, the Rockford roofer, found a nearly religious way to resolve the stress of anti-George banners that have been flying over the house while not actually sacrificing the prize. He came to the conclusion that the secret point of “Big Brother” was for a house full of contestants to stop competing against each other and all walk out together. “It all fits,” he marveled.

He was wrong, and everyone else knew he was wrong. But the idea of revolution appealed to most of his housemates. Curtis, the Stanford-educated lawyer and natural diplomat, said he’d found the competitive aspects of the show increasingly “distasteful.” He’d also had a taste of turning down big money in favor of principle on the last live show. (Big Brother had offered the housemates $50,000 to leave; unbeknownst to them, the producers planned to replace the resident who left with a curvaceous, self-described “bitch.”) He liked it, and he liked the idea of all going out together.

Josh, the rudderless young jock who has told everyone he just wants to be understood, felt viewers were getting the wrong impression: That they were seeing a group of greedy graspers instead of the great friends they are.

Cassandra, the African-American U.N. worker and the group’s other natural diplomat, is always up for something that brings people together and shows them in a dignified light.

Jamie the pageant queen and Eddie the one-legged college athlete — well, they didn’t really want to forsake camera and prize money, respectively. But they didn’t choose to go against the group.

The next ten or 12 hours of live feed on the Internet were giddy business. The housemates were excited to have taken their fates into their own hands — to be doing something. So were their viewers.

Suddenly the show was the talk of the Net again. Suddenly, the show was entertaining — to those watching from outside, because it looked like it was entertaining to those locked inside.

During all that time, however, the producers bided their time and said little to the houseguests.

At 9:30 last night, the group went into the Red Room en masse to announce their intention to leave.

An hour later, CBS had apparently decided that two and a half weeks of dull “Big Brother” — that’s how long the show is scheduled to run — was better than half a week of exciting “Big Brother,” and Big Brother went into full throttle to quash the rebellion.

A producer who introduced himself as John talked to Jamie alone in the Red Room. She told the group later that she suggested that he talk to everyone together through the microphones in the living room. But John flattered her by talking to her alone and having her pass his “thoughts” on to the others.

Jamie said that John was “intrigued” at the houseguests’ making such a large decision on such “limited data.”

He said the residents couldn’t know what people in the outside world thought from a few airplane banners and some quick words from Brittany. He urged them, as someone from outside the house, to stay.

He told the would-be actress that the show had fans who loved them, and they’d be letting those fans down if they left. And, if they worried about being seen as competitive, why did they think the public thought that was a bad thing? He told the beauty pageant winner that the public can hardly blame anyone for winning a vote by the public.

Others of the housemates filed in, to hear arguments tailor-made for each of them.

Josh was assured that the show was not edited to make it look like they were competing with each other.

Fair-minded Curtis left the Red Room impressed with John’s “intelligence.” John told Curtis it wasn’t reasonable for him to make a decision based on partial information. John asked Curtis if he really wanted to be part of a group instead of thinking for himself, and if he wanted to base his decision on things outside the house instead of what he could see inside the house. (Curtis noted later that John was from outside of the house, an inherent contradiction in his argument.)

Cassandra said she didn’t need to go in and talk to John. He’d already convinced her not to leave weeks ago, when she wanted to protest a back-stabbing competition, telling her she would be committing an affront to her own dignity; she knew what he’d have to say.

And Eddie simply told everyone he didn’t know what had happened to him. He hadn’t been himself. He slept on the decision, but in the morning he told the others (and later a camera he thought his mother might be watching) that he’d somehow changed from the single-mindedly determined young man who’d gone into the house.

“I fixed it last night. I’m back to normal.” He said to his housemates, “I’m here for me.”

Sunday morning, all that was left of the rebellion was the housemates’ individual efforts to convince George that he didn’t have to walk by himself, that he had nothing to apologize for even if a campaign was on that would win him the competition.

George even took Cassandra aside to let her know that his plan was to walk out with her if she was banished Wednesday, but she insisted he shouldn’t do it.

In the creepiest moment of all, Josh told George he really should go and talk to John: He’d feel better.

Curtis and Cassandra pointed out to Josh that John might be a very nice man, but he wasn’t an objective third party.

Curtis and Cassandra are both perfectly willing to walk, still, but with Eddie, Jamie, and probably Josh out, there is no group to walk with.

Talk to John. You’ll feel better.

And then each went back to being one of the dull on a show where nothing actually real can be allowed to happen.

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.

What went wrong in America? Why don’t we have the crazy sex, the near-fistfights, the steady walkouts and replacements that England and the other European shows have seen?

The television show is generally boring. The live shows have been astonishingly lame. The producers have over and over shown they aren’t really paying attention to the people they have under their cameras 24 hours a day: Paul Romer told reporters he was certain someone would walk for $10,000; no non-professional watching the Internet feed would have thought so. (Ultimately, of course, the residents turned their noses up at five times that amount.)

The producers seemed surprised and a little hurt that the houseguests took exception to their having Eddie call three of his housemates “bitches” in a pre-scripted joke.

The fascinating thing about Big Brother is only available to those who watch the Internet feed and see how the television show reveals the producers’ misunderstandings, if not distortions.

Despite this potential debacle, there’s a good chance “Big Brother” will be shown again. The networks are in an awkward position next season: They’re looking at possible simultaneous actors and writers strikes.

That’s why there are so many reality shows and game shows on the drawing boards. There will be a “Big Brother 2,” and whoever does the day-to-day production of that one (perhaps not Evolution, this time, after the results of this one) is going to be trying to take lessons.

Will they cast it entirely with nymphomaniacs and would-be Richard Hatches?

But even Paul Romer has said that Hatch, the winner of “Survivor,” would have been voted out of the “Big Brother” house by the American public. With what must have been considerable frustration, he told interviewers that American viewers are taking a friendly attitude in their voting, voting to keep people in the house who can get along, rather than to keep in the villains that would get them “Survivor”-style ratings.

Frankly, they’ve got the voting system backwards. People only bother to make a 99-cent phone call when they’re motivated. When it’s a negative vote, they vote for the people they have negative feelings about.

A positive vote — a system in which the person with the most votes stayed — would never have voted kooky Brittany out. Nor, probably, Jordan the head-gaming ex-stripper.

It’s hard for me to suggest to Romer that he needs to put in a system that probably would have banished underrated Curtis, whose humor and dead-on Eddie impersonations rarely make the broadcast, very early.

But it’s a better answer than casting a mental asylum.

Meanwhile, a group of six Americans have decided to turn down money (though not, they can only hope, fame) in order to stick together against a “Big Brother” that’s tried to pit them against each other.

That’s great television. It may not be the “history” the housemates are currently describing it, if only because they don’t have that size of an audience. But it could be great, great television: the unexpected, the revolt of the little guy, idealism over greed — America! Great television.

If the producers can play it right.

There’s the rub.

The subject was dropped — until early Saturday morning, when the residents made a pact to walk off the show on this Wednesday’s live episode.

The plan was shown on the 24-hour live Internet camera feeds from the house.

In other words, the dry run for the Revolution of the Houseguests has turned into the real thing — unless CBS can, or wants to, abort it.

George, the affable middle-aged roofer, is at the center of the crisis. Each week, two or more of the residents of the house are up for banishment, by audience vote, via 99-cent phone calls. Two weeks ago, CBS made a special trip to his home town of Rockford, Ill., to show a tavern and a phone company teaming up to offer free calls to vote out another resident, the zany “cuddle slut,” Brittany.

Brittany was indeed voted out that week.

Some viewers, outraged at the Rockford plot, raised money to fly planes with banners over the household to warn the residents dark deeds were afoot.

On last Wednesday’s show, Brittany, allowed to talk to one house resident for a few moments, told her chief cuddle partner, a stolid jock named Josh, that George’s town was targeting residents. “It’s mean out there,” she squealed.

Josh, not wanting it to get mean in the house, kept this information to himself — to the frustration of his housemates.

A reporter in Rockford pretty much established that the calls from Rockford would probably not have affected the result; sources at CBS told him that Brittany outpolled George by some 20,000 votes.

Still, another plane flew over the house Friday: “Josh knows why we fly anti-George banners,” the message said.

Matters came to a head Saturday. George decided there was not only a secret, but a secret Big Brother riddle, which this Saturday morning he announced he had solved.

Big Brother cut off the live Internet feed for about fifteen minutes, from 10 a.m. to 10:15 a.m. PDT — shifting all live cameras to the chicken coop. By 10:15 they gave up, and feed viewers listened and watched as:

George told everyone he thought the secret Josh had learned, and that was causing the anti-George messages, was that his wife Teresa had organized a voting campaign in his favor. (It’s not clear how he deduced all of this.)

He said they hadn’t preplanned it, but he thought Teresa was resourceful enough to have done it. (Or, as it probably happened, to have gone along with the plans of local DJs and other people making Rockford hay of their local hero.)

Josh confirmed that Brittany told him there was a campaign to vote out George’s most popular competitors.

George vowed he would not turn the people in the house against each other. His plan: He would walk with whoever was banished — Curtis, Cassandra and Eddie are the current nominees — on Wednesday.

Shortly after, everyone had agreed to walk. Even one-legged basketball player Eddie, who has never made any bones about being in this for the “ends” — the $500,000 payoff to the single winner of the contest — agreed to follow George’s revolution this time.

George, it must be said, is hoping this really isn’t a revolution. He spent hours with the “Big Brother” contestants’ manual, looking for clues. He seems to have come to the conclusion that if all the residents decide to leave together, they’ll all get the prize money!

He’s convinced no one else of this unlikely premise.

“Big Brother” producers, since then, have called Eddie into the Red Room and confirmed there’s no game within the game — if the residents walk, they get nothing. By mid-afternoon, George still hadn’t dropped the theory, though.

What everyone thinks was nicely captured by the young lawyer Curtis, somewhere in the giddy hours of conversation that followed the decision to throw away the grand prize money in favor of banding together:

“It’s a game. But guess what? After a while, it’s not a fun game.”

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.

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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.”

In another, the demure beauty queen Jamie was made to make a risqui remark about Josh’s cuddlings with Brittany: “In the love bed, he gets Brittany off.” And there was a joke about unhappy housewife Karen’s husband.

But the one that fomented the rebellion was given to Eddie, the one-legged basketball player from Long Island. The joke was directed at Josh, but the people it upset were the two remaining twentysomething women in the house, whom, with departed stripper Jordan, it identified as three “bitches” Josh had chased. The punch line was, no wonder the dog (a female pug introduced to the house half a week earlier) hides under the couch.

After the roast, Brittany went to the bedroom and cried. Dignified Cassandra fumed quietly about the producers’ use of “the ‘B word.’” Jamie — who on July 22 told a housemate she wasn’t worried about CBS editing footage to deliberately distort what happened in the house because “CBS is a noble network” — told everyone that the joke would surely be broadcast as though it were just Eddie’s; she was right.

Curtis went into the Red Room, where housemates can (and once a day, must) talk privately with the disembodied voice of the producers. The residents lucked out having a lawyer around. He asked about the group’s contracts. (Cassandra told Curtis that her lawyer had advised her not to sign: “They’ll own you.” Curtis replied he’d “used a fool for a lawyer” when it came to going over the contract — himself.)

He wanted to know if the contracts permitted BB to divulge things said confidentially in that room to others still in the house. The housemates have agreed that they will not tell each other whom they are nominating for banishment every two weeks; now they’re worried CBS will force them to watch the supposedly confidential Red Room nominations — or even some of their answers to questions about how they feel about each other. Big Brother gave Curtis only vague responses to his questions.

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This was the setting for the unexpected walk-out proposal by George. The 41-year-old Rockford, Ill., roofer is most often seen on television (and on the feed) joking, clucking like a chicken and talking about his family. Suddenly, he became Spartacus.

His idea was an utterly unique labor revolt: If they couldn’t trust BB to portray them honestly on television, the contestants could simply end the show by agreeing to all walk out together.

He was talking to Brittany, who had pulled herself together and joined him in the dim light of their tiny enclosed yard. It was after 10:30 at night. George has appointed himself a father figure to the 25-year-old chemist, and he was worried about her: She assured him she was all right. He said that, as a father, he worried about the whole situation.

“You know what I’m trying to say? I’m just saying we should all think about what we got ourselves into here.”

Brittany admitted she feared the show was “trying to make us look like idiots, for ratings.” Now that she believed that, she said, “I don’t want to be here.”

George repeated a theme diplomatic Cassandra has often rung: “You know who has control here.”

Brittany now could imagine CBS splicing her words, changing, “I’m upset about the roast” into “I’m upset about Eddie.”

George’s first suggestion was the television equivalent of a sit-down strike: “So we have to talk about nothing at all.”

Brittany thought it would be better if they simply stopped talking: “I don’t want to be part of a show that calls women ‘bitches’ and makes fun of Cassandra not having sex in a year.” No one had to say that this would be as difficult on the housemates as on the producers. All the housemates have to occupy their brains is each other. They can’t wander into the jungle like the “Survivor” folks.

That’s when George suggested they all walk out of the house together. Everyone understands that his family could use the money — the $500,000 CBS will reward to the last resident of the house — but he not only said he was in for it, he suggested calling a meeting to discuss it.

“I hadn’t thought of all of us leaving,” Brittany mused.

George said, “But it’d have to be all of us.”

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In any event, there was no walkout. George and Brittany realized that it would be hard on some residents, like Eddie, who has made no bones about wanting to win the money to pay off his family’s medical debts.

And conflict-averse Curtis suggested instead that they have a meal and see how they felt afterward. After the meal, they decided to stick it out — and be more suspicious.

If “Big Brother” is about what being in a constrained situation reveals about ordinary people, this was the most surprising revelation about what George is made of. It’s certainly the most interesting, most dramatic turn of events in the “Big Brother” house, the moment the contestants realized that CBS is more to be taken as an adversary than a host: That Rubicon crossed, they haven’t been as trusting since.

If you saw the broadcasts, you know this is how CBS spun that night:

Lowlights of the roast were shown, including the “bitches” joke. Only a few choppy moments of the residents’ being upset was shown. Then we got footage of Eddie in the Red Room saying that he didn’t think everyone should take the jokes so seriously — they knew what they were getting into. He was not shown to say the joke wasn’t his idea.

And the discussion between the two mutineers by the garden? Their distrust was only suggested: We saw Brittany telling George that she’d responded to a Red Room interrogator that, if she had to change her vote, she’d vote for George, since he’d gotten no other nominations and it would have effectively made her vote harmless.

But it gave no indication of an incipient revolt.

The context of Curtis demanding and failing to receive assurances from the producers that confidential Red Room conversations would remain confidential was eliminated, making Brittany look merely paranoid. The broadcast showed George shushing her: “Don’t worry about it!”

Damage: controlled.

A month and a half of minor and less-minor distortions add up, and they can’t be summarized in one article. But here are just a few more things you might have liked to know:

Take the hours-long game of Truth or Dare the housemates played late last Wednesday night. CBS ran only a fleeting clip. The announcer said the first question was directed at Jordan, the triathlete and former stripper. George, the genial blue-collar dad, asked her who she was attracted to when she first entered the house, and we saw Jordan reply, “Two women and two men, and one of the names is Brittany.”

The broadcast told a lie: Jordan was far from the first person questioned. CBS made George’s interest in her predilections look pretty dodgy, where in reality George hadn’t even heard of the game before he was asked if he’d ever cheated on his wife. (He didn’t even have to consider the Dare component: George, you’ll be relieved to hear, has never cheated.) He came up with the attraction question because it had already been used by others.

You also didn’t see Jordan go through what must have been a 15-minute negotiation process, trying to whittle the question down into something she was willing to answer. She avoided answering a male name, except for cheerfully saying that she was no longer attracted to outspoken William, now that she saw him as a friend — she tried to get off the hook with that non-answer but the housemates insisted she answer some version of the actual question.

Jordan then was careful to broaden her definition of “attraction” as widely as possible for the answer she gave. Since then, she’s explained to virtually every other woman in the house that when she says she finds women attractive, she’s not saying she’s “a total bisexual.” The actual Truth or Dare session revealed a Jordan more insecure, self-concealing and manipulative than Jordan herself seemed comfortable with.

Very different from the bada-bing-bada-boom television version.

If you just watch the show on television, you also didn’t see why “Naked trampoline!” has become a house catchphrase. You didn’t see unhappy housewife Karen asked by self-professed black role model William about the time and circumstances of her first orgasm. The penalty for non-answer would be to hand over her cigarettes to William. (“Now that’s how you play Truth or Dare,” he said to George.)

Karen, the mom, embarrassed, told a story of being “fingered” in the front seat of her senior boyfriend’s car, in her driveway, when she was a sophomore: The next day she said that had been a lie. “A lie? I didn’t know we could lie! I would’ve lied!” cried little magenta-haired Brittany (who has made a lot of money in the stock market, and rents out half the duplex she owns — did you know that?)

“I needed my cigarettes,” Karen said.

Meanwhile, Karen and George, the house elders, went outside during the second round and talked about the importance of witnessing your faith. (She thinks people could go to hell if they don’t; he’s less worried that God would do that.) Eddie is the only person in the house who doesn’t seem to be religious (lost his faith when he lost his leg). That’s one of the unexpected questions “Big Brother” has raised for me: Is this representative of the amount of religious discourse among most Americans?

The media-savvy housemates wonder frequently to each other what’s going out on the Internet, and what’s being edited into television. They have little to go on — just a few ideas from the featurettes the show created to introduce them to viewers on the premiere episode. Brittany, it turns out, felt odd being filmed going to church: She’s a spiritual person, but she doesn’t attend church. When Cassandra, the thoughtful U.N. worker, told Curtis, the young All-American Asian lawyer, that CBS had wanted to shoot her inline skating (she means to take lessons and in the meantime “didn’t want to look like an idiot” skating awkwardly), he said, “They were desperate for Rollerblading! They asked me to skate for them.”

They’re guessing wrong about the Internet feed, though. They think we just get one long shot per room on our computers. When they leave, one by one, they’ll see we’re getting everything, including close-ups, edited in real time.

Jordan, in particular, obsesses about the broadcast. Until she told her housemates Saturday night about her stripping background, she phrased this over and over in ominously vague terms: “There are things about my past that America knows and you don’t know, and I don’t know how they’re representing it. I don’t know how they’re editing me. They could show Mega rubbing my foot when I was lying there having my mask done and make me look totally slutty.”

(Actually, instead of that, the network showed a short clip of William massaging her foot in a dark room, via infrared photography. They’ve also shown footage making it look like there’s chemistry between her and Josh, though if they’d shown more of that kitchen conversation, you would have heard her tell him, “I’m not going to hook up with anyone in this house” in a tone any woman would recognize as the diplomatic way of saying, “I’m not going to hook up with you.“)

While CBS, since the stressful first vote, has focused on William’s vengeful throwing of the Dead or Alive food-budget wager, Internet voyeurs know the biggest effect on the house was Jordan’s insistence that everyone aid her personal growth by telling her exactly why they voted her out.

Curtis, the young Asian lawyer, noted that a nomination took only three votes — “You all voted me out” was probably an exaggeration. (Curtis has said, “As a lawyer, I’m conflict-averse.”) Diplomatic Curtis and Cassandra, who works at the United Nations, convinced the others that they shouldn’t talk about something so artificial and forced as the vote. Unhappy Jordan went back and forth for days — from saying she’s come to terms with the vote to prodding the other women into telling her. Internet voyeurs can only be relieved, now that she’s told the group about her stripper past and apparently made up from a fight with Brittany (“I can tell you really want to tell me”; “You don’t respect that I gave my word”; “You’re just shallow, going along with the group!”), that she might be able to move on to other topics of conversation.

CBS is looking for conflicts and sexual tension. (The latter has been strangely subdued so far, notwithstanding the activities of Brittany, a self-confessed “cuddle slut,” and of touchy-feely Josh.) So you haven’t seen one-legged Eddie’s humorous protectiveness of the older housemates. He did a hilarious cooking-show parody making bread with George last week. (The housemates have found that cooking, making bread and doing laundry by hand, all of which take up a lot of time, can be very companionable activities.)

“Tell ‘em how many miles you can get on a fruitcake, Eddie.”

“On your average fruitcake, you can get 80, 90,000 miles.”

“Tell ‘em about the tread on a fruitcake, Eddie.”

“Oh man, they hug the curves, they hug the curves like Anna Nicole Smith!”

“Now we gotta let it rise for an hour. This would be a perfect time for a beer, but we ain’t got no beer! So we’ll have water. Do you have frustrations, Eddie?”

“Yes, I do.”

“What’re you gonna do if you have frustrations, Eddie?”

“I’m gonna give that dough a right cross and a left upper-cut.”

Eddie swapped his bed for George’s upper bunk when he thought George was shaken by William’s “intimidations” from the lower one. Eddie’s also a tonic for Karen, whom he often hangs with, playing Frisbee or listening to her venting frustrations. He says, “Don’t be a hater, Karen!” which makes her laugh at his exaggeration of her mild complaints. It’s become his pet name for her: “How’s it going, Hater?” he’ll call to her when she comes into the yard.

Brittany sometimes calls Karen and George Mom and Dad, and George often calls her My Young Child. The other night, he was worrying in the bathroom that he was out of place in a young crowd. “It’s totally awesome that you’re here!” Brittany assured him. She’s promised to take him to Burning Man, and George is psyched by that.

They haven’t been there long enough to forget the cameras. The wall-mounted cameras make noise when they pan or zoom, and the housemates sometimes wave at them or point it out. “Hi, it’s me, the total spazz,” Brittany told the bathroom camera after her fight with Jordan.

Curtis was talking about it the other day as he made bread in the kitchen with Cassandra: “My friends told me they’d have the Internet on 24-7. How boring is that?”

Cassandra told him, “Well, they have to keep watching in case you do something amazing.” Curtis laughed at the idea of him doing something amazing. “They have to see you being a master baker.”

William, at the kitchen table, said, “Masturbator!” and giggled.

Curtis laughed again and said, “I’m here long enough, they’ll probably see that.”

“Now, that just isn’t right!” Cassandra said.

“My friends asked me about it. They asked if I’d be masturbating while I was here. I said, ‘Masturbating on national TV, I doubt it.’” He laughed again. Curtis laughs a lot. “Then — wait a second, there’s no doubt!”

Two weeks in, the difficulty isn’t the food, or having to do laundry by hand, or the cameras in the showers. It’s the housemates’ realizing they have very different ideas of how people relate to each other, the clearest divide being between William and Jordan, who both want Serious Conversation (him about social issues, her about Personal Growth), and most of the others, who are more comfortable just chilling. (Cassandra and Curtis try to bridge the gap.)

When Jordan and Brittany made up Sunday night, Jordan told Brittany she had to learn to relax more, and Brittany said she had to learn to deal with things more directly. A positive story arc on the Internet!

For now.

Stay clicked.