It’s no surprise that CBS’ Big Brother inspires strong reactions from its fans—just express an opinion on Twitter and watch what happens! But now that passion has been quantified, and the data shows that Big Brother creates emotional responses much more than any other TV show—not double, or triple the average show, but 41 times more.
Here’s one example: Episode five, which aired July 6 and saw the exit of Jillian after Christmas confronted Cody and Jessica, had 41 times “more emotional reactions than the average TV airing that week,” according to Canvs, an “an emotion analytics company.”
At my request, Canvs did an analysis of Twitter data for reality blurred, covering June 28 through July 20, the most-recent live eviction episode.
In the show’s first three weeks, there were more than 357,000 emotional reactions from a pool of “61,702 unique emotionally reacting authors,” each of whom averaged 5.8 emotional reactions each.
That’s about one third of the total tweeting volume, because 32.8 percent of BB19 tweets “express some sort of emotion,” Canvs said.
Over those three weeks, Big Brother generated:
- 15.8 times more love reactions than the average reality TV show
- 17.4 times more emotional reactions than the average reality show
Thursday live evictions inspire more emotional reactions, which makes sense: they’re essentially the climax of the week’s events. The three Thursday episodes had about 84,000 emotional reactions, while the three Wednesday episodes had around 50,000.
The BB19 houseguests who create the most emotional reactions
One houseguest has sparked more emotion than all the others: Cody Nickson. Canvs said he is “the top driver of emotions,” responsible for more than double the number of emotional reactions than the next person.
That’s determined by the number of references to him showing up in tweets that Canvs judges to be emotional reactions.
Here are the top five houseguests based on the emotional reactions they inspire from fans:
- Cody Nickson , 13.9 percent of emotional reactions
- Jessica Graf, 6.5 percent
- Christmas Abbott, 6.1 percent
- Josh Martinez, 5.6 percent
- Kevin Schlehuber, 4.7 percent
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