The Big Brother ratings have come in from the first two episodes of the season, possibly showing that fans are more excited about tuning in for the BB23 cast than they were for the BB22 cast last summer.
For the Big Brother 2021 season premiere, CBS drew an estimated number of just over four million viewers for the 90-minute episode. This was a slight bump over the estimated 3.64 million viewers who tuned in to watch the first episode of 2020.
On Sunday night (July 11), the Big Brother ratings dipped a tad, with an estimated 3.66 million viewers tuning in to see the first nominations of the season. Those numbers helped the show finish ahead of everything that wasn’t linked to the NBA Finals between the Milwaukee Bucks and Phoenix Suns.
It is very clear that Big Brother is serving as a good lead-in to the new season of Love Island USA, but CBS might want to see better numbers from the dating show. On July 11, the new episode of Love Island had an estimated 1.33 million viewers.
Comparing the BB23 ratings to the BB22 ratings
So far, the Big Brother ratings for this season are looking much better than a year ago. Just 2.95 million viewers tuned in for the second live episode of 2020, which is far behind the 3.64 million estimated for Episode 2 this season.
There’s a long way to go when it comes to the 2021 season of the show, so it’s far too early to state that this summer will outperform the Big Brother 22 cast. Later in that season, more viewers started tuning in, helping bump up the averages in the later months.
The first eviction episode last season drew an estimated 4.02 million viewers, so it will be interesting to see if the July 15 episode of BB23 can match or surpass that number.
Of note is that CBS just revealed when the Big Brother 23 season finale will air, showing that this is going to be a shorter season than normal.
More Big Brother news
The Big Brother 23 cast is playing in teams for the first few weeks. On the first episode, everyone was placed on a team and there are currently four Team Captains as well. Moving forward, one team is going to be short a person after the July 15 Eviction Ceremony.
For readers who want to jump ahead, we have some Big Brother spoilers about who is going home first. The house has basically stated who is going to get voted out and there probably isn’t much that could change that voting structure in the next few days.
It was great news to hear that the Big Brother prize has been increased to $750,000 this year. Recently, Big Brother 22 winner Cody Calafiore revealed what he spent his winnings on. And when she heard about the prize increase, Big Brother 13 winner Rachel Reilly said she wants to play the game again.
Big Brother 23 airs Sundays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays at 8/7c on CBS.
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