Andy DehnartLive voting began today for ABC’s The Glass House, but CBS is still fighting to stop the show in court because of its similarities to Big Brother, and more importantly, that the new series is produced by people who used to work on the CBS show.
Voting is live on ABC’s site, and includes questions such as “What type of party drinks should the players receive?”, “Which party game would you like to see the players enjoy?”, and “match the players with the rooms in which you want them to sleep.” Voting requires signing in via an ABC.com account, though you can also expedite that by signing in via Twitter or Facebook.
As to the legal battle, the latest update is that a judge may decide whether to give CBS a temporary restraining order this week, after ordering ABC to respond by Monday at 5 p.m., Variety reports.
Redacted court documents revealed that Glass House executive producer Kenny Rosen “acknowledged in a recent deposition that he deleted emails after ABC had been warned by CBS that it would be sued, court documents said. It also alleges that Rosen directed a staffer to copy manuals he obtained while working on ‘Big Brother,'” the AP reports.
CBS said that “further demonstrates the brazen lengths that former ‘Big Brother’ producers have gone to use confidential material, obtained while under our employment, to develop this new show.” In that seven hour deposition (!), he also revealed that about half of the new show’s crew, 25 to 30 people, used to work on Big Brother, more than CBS claimed initially.
ABC said in a filing that what “CBS does not tell this Court is that Mr. Rosen also testified that the vast majority of these people worked with Mr. Rosen more recently on a different reality show, Hell’s Kitchen, that has nothing to do with Big Brother. It is true that Mr. Rosen hires people with whom he has experience working on reality shows; there is nothing improper about that.”
Separately, ABC also said the manual is “not a trade secret, but instead common sense items that anyone with reality show experience (or real life experience, for that matter) could compile.” In a statement, Rosen said,
“CBS first tried to intimidate me and then sued me for agreeing to work for a competing network. What CBS is doing is wrong on many levels and I look forward to our day in court.”
In a separate statement, ABC said,
“This is a naked attempt by CBS to stifle competition and creativity by claiming that reality techniques that have been developed over many years, on many shows by countless producers, are somehow exclusive to CBS.”