Bigg Boss 20: Bigg Boss 20 hasn’t even properly begun yet, and we are already doing the annual ritual. We have all started looking at the blurry pictures, decoding Instagram posts, discussing rumoured names, arguing over who is actually confirmed, deciding who would make a good contestant and the most important of all: trying to predict what kind of person each of them will be if they enter the Bigg Boss house.
Bigg Boss 20 and Bigg Boss Recipe
With nineteen seasons already having aired, we know the format by heart. We know the house, nominations, fights over food, beds, duties and absolutely microscopic misunderstandings that somehow will become a national discourse.
We know that someone will cry, someone will scream, someone will refuse relationships, and someone else will make relationships anyway. We also know that someone will become a villain; someone a victim; another person a meme; and someone will leave the house and somehow will be discussed even after their eviction. However, every year, we return to the same question of who is entering.
Perhaps that is the real Bigg Boss recipe: the house is the setting, the tasks machinery, the weekend episodes, but the people are the product, and after 20 seasons, India’s fascination with Bigg Boss may have less to do with watching people live together and much more to do with our slightly unhinged tendency to become emotionally invested in famous people who are actually strangers.
We Just Need People to Obsess Over
If Bigg Boss were purely about its format, Bigg Boss 20 should feel a little tired because the concept remains the same with a little reset: the house changes; the rules get a makeover; the tasks get louder; the production gets shinier, but the biggest reset is always the cast because suddenly there are new people to figure out and that is where Bigg Boss becomes less of a television show and more of a personality testing laboratory.
We do not enter the season with a blank slate; we already know things about these people: we have seen their television shows, reels, interviews, controversies, or something to do with their public persona.
Bigg Boss 20 Contestants’ Prediction: The Contestants List is Now Its Own Entertainment Genre
There is a special kind of madness that happens before Bigg Boss begins: let us call it the “pre-Bigg Boss Investigation Department. A certain name appears on a rumoured list; someone says they are confirmed, someone else denies, and a fan page posts the reasons they should be on the show: it appears like suddenly people who have never met these contestants are running online investigation teams.
The names that appear with the first look reels of the contestants, the names that appear in the comment sections, are Kanika Mann, Yung DSA, and Isha Rikhi.
We would not build any conspiracy theory board and declare them the confirmed contestants because it is just an Instagram hint.
Kanika Mann makes sense as a name for a Bigg Boss conversation because she already has a recognisable television identity; Yung DSA, meanwhile, belongs to an entirely different corner of the entertainment ecosystem, being a popular name in the rap world, bringing that internet-narrative familiarity that Bigg Boss has increasingly embraced.
Honestly, whether they enter or not almost becomes secondary to the fact that we are having fun trying to work it out. The guessing has become a part of the show. The premiere has not happened, and the fandom is already clocking in.
Love Gill or Rhiya Ahir?
The show has again brought back the “vote for your favourite contestant to see them in the show” format. The fans are supposed to choose between Rhiya Ahir and Love Gill and vote for their favourite to see them as part of the show.
Rhiya Ahir entered the public eye through a viral moment during the students’ protest in Mumbai when she stopped the detention van by standing in front of it. Now, the possibility of seeing her inside the Bigg Boss house gives the audience a chance to encounter a person beyond the clip that made them know her.
Meanwhile, Love Gill is an Indian actress and model prominent in the Punjabi entertainment industry, who made her debut with the 2019 music video “Facts”. Thus, her social media presence has been longer.
We Do Not Just Ask If They Are Entertaining
This is where things get personal because Bigg Boss viewers rarely stop at just watching people; they dissect their past: digging through their works, social media posts, news about them. The contestant thus is no longer simply someone we are watching, but they become someone “we think” we understand, and the show encourages the feeling implicitly.
Bigg Boss compresses the process of knowing celebrities as we spend almost 3 months watching them through their daily routine, and our brain gets so stuck in processing and mapping them that a connection is built.
The Sidharth-Shehnaaz Phenomenon
Recall Bigg Boss Season 13. We had a great friendship on-screen: the Sidharth Shukla-Shehnaaz Gill friendship. Whatever your personal interpretation of their relationship was, their Bigg Boss dynamic was much bigger than two contestants getting along, and it became a fandom: SidNaz.
People watched their conversations, analysed their expressions, made fan edits, debated over them and built online communities around them, and their attachment did not conveniently disappear when Bigg Boss Season 13.
We Keep Choosing Favourites
Every season gives us new names: Gauhar Khan, Gautam Gulati, Sidharth Shukla, Rubina Dilaik, Shehnaaz Gill, Elvish Yadav, Avinash Mishra, Munawar Faruqui, Manisha Rani, Farrhana Bhatt, Gaurav Khanna.
The names change, the fandoms change, but the mechanism behind it does not. Some win because they understand the game; some are loved for being bold, some for being funny, some are loved for their vulnerability. Fascination is powerful, and you do not really have to approve of somebody to keep watching them; you just wonder what they will do next, and that is what Bigg Boss lives on.
Bigg Boss Has Turned the Audience into Participants
The relationships have also changed because television no longer ends at the television screen: we vote, make edits, comment on edits, follow fan accounts, post clips, fight rival fandoms, rank contestants, predict evictions, and discuss who deserves the trophy even with strangers online.
The audience is not merely consuming the season but is constantly producing content around it and caring about discussions and arguments. Bigg Boss has become a conversation that happens to have a television show attached to it, and the contestants are the real currency of the conversation.
Perhaps the Real Bigg Boss Experiment is Happening Outside the House
Twenty seasons later, the show has spent years observing contestants, but it has also accidentally become a pretty fascinating observation of us.
Why are our choices like they are, and what makes us like a certain contestant, are questions worth asking. Bigg Boss gives us an illusion of closeness, and social media makes that illusion stronger. We can follow contestants while they are inside the house: look at old posts, find old interviews, and see how their friends support them.
The contestant has a life, and we have a version of it.
So, What Exactly are We Returning For?
Perhaps that is the question BB20 should actually make us ask because twenty seasons is a long time. The format, house, nominations, fights, everything remains the same, but the people are new.
Every season gives the audience another set of strangers to argue about, defend, dislike, obsess over and eventually remember.
On the eve of Bigg Boss Season 20, the most exciting question is not necessarily what Bigg Boss has planned, but it is who are we going to get attached to this time, because the show was never really selling the house but the people who became characters for us. We have willingly accepted that fact.
Bigg Boss 20 Premieres on September 6 on JioHotstar.
Also Read:
