I'd say BB15. I can put up with a lot of the rubbish the producers come out with, because at the end of the day it's about following a bunch of Housemates and their dynamics with each other, and up until that point it hadn't really deviated from that format, regardless of how many incidental elements had changed. BB15 destroyed that. There were some utterly unlikeable Housemates, and these people were protected at all costs by the producers (okay, in fairness only one of them was protected, but that one was very significant and the House dynamics - my reason for watching it - were barred from evolving because she was protected, so a major mistake in my opinion). All of the tasks seemed designed to provoke rows. And the worst thing of all, the amount of twists they threw in was ridiculous. I don't even mind twists provided they don't draw the line, but there were so many in Power Trip it was actually very difficult firstly to work out what was happening in the first place, and secondly to grow to feel anything complex for any of the Housemates. There wasn't a single week where there were just normal nominations.
And BB16 was even worse, because it was going so well to start with. I was all prepared to write off BB15 as a bad job and give BB16 a clean slate, because I can accept that the producers will sometimes make mistakes. But when a series is going well, as BB16 was for the first couple of weeks, you don't shake up the dynamics by evicting some of the most popular Housemates on Week 2. And yes, I know that people will say that the viewing figures went up after Marc's entrance - maybe they did, but not by very much. The viewing figures for the first few weeks of the series following the most disliked series in history will always be bad, no matter what they do. A little bit of excitement may have brought in another thousand or so, but I think it would have got more than that in time had they stuck to their guns. And then they thought it was a good idea to bring back Helen, the woman who had driven so many people off in the first place!
Actually, the current series has been markedly better. There are still many areas for improvement, but there have been a few interesting tasks (though a few dreadful ones as well), quite a lot of scenes just focussing on the Housemates, the return of the shopping list, and most importantly a consistent nomination and eviction process without anyone being protected. I'm dreading this week as I think it will be this series' equivalent of 4 in, 4 out - again, messing with dynamics that are working for no reason - but it won't have the same impact because we're almost at the end of the series. I really hope that next year will continue in the same style as this one, with improvements. I don't know why the present series is so short - I don't mind it being short, but if you're going to make a six-week series you don't start out with eighteen contestants. A five-year-old could tell you that.
