The Best ‘Big Brother’ Player Ever: Dr. Will Kirby

At the same time Will was continuing to make great strategic moves, he also was – intentionally or not – driving Nicole crazier every day. Will did a variety of things to ease his boredom and have fun. But the more fun Will had, the angrier Nicole became. So while he was somewhat endearing himself to the houseguests who would become jurors, she was pushing them away.

Getting back to the deal Will made with Hardy and Nicole. Although he would have happily ignored the deal, Will found another way around it. In the final four HOH competition, Will was facing off against Monica (Nicole having accidentally fallen out already, in part due to Will). He realized that Monica would take out Hardy or Nicole, since they planned to get rid of her. So he threw the competition.

Hardy and Nicole were fuming mad and claimed he broke their deal. No, he hadn’t. As Will said, “I agreed not to nominate you if I won Head of Household. I didn’t win.” They were mad at him for lying, which was in itself laughable since he had been doing it all season – but in this case, he didn’t even need to lie. So Hardy was sent packing by Will, the only person with a vote.

It was down to the final three of Will, Nicole, and Monica. Neither Will nor Nicole wanted to win HOH and boot Monica, as they feared she would vote for the other in the end. Nicole told Will he’d better not throw the HOH competition or she’d throw it back to him. Nicole then won HOH. Was it because she was better or because Will threw it? I know what the likely answer is! Nicole figured she had a much better shot of beating Will in the finale (a point he had been driving home for weeks on end), so Monica was evicted.

So it was Will and Nicole in the final two. Over the course of the season, both had been reviled at one point or another. But while Will had played the game as a game, Nicole had let her emotions spill out in a big mess. In fact, on the official CBS Big Brother website, approximately 85% of the 160,000 voters wanted Will to win as we approached the finale.

The jurors responded similarly. Although Will almost blew it with a bizarre final speech that essentially said if they didn’t like Will then they didn’t like reality TV and therefore didn’t like themselves. Huh? I’m sure he was trying to be funny and at the same time say he was the best player, but he really managed to piss people off instead. Lucky for him, he had laid enough of a foundation by that point that it didn’t change anything.

Will was evil and a liar, but he played the game – and had fun while doing it. He never proclaimed himself best friends with somebody and then talked about them behind their backs, because he never pretended to be doing anything but playing the game.

The jury appreciated that – and in those days, the jury was everybody who played the game and then watched it on TV when they were done! (Well, everybody but Justin, who was thrown out of the house and became the first Reality TV Hall of Shame inductee.) Will not only won, but ended up with five votes to Nicole’s two (there was a rule at the time that allowed each finalist to nullify one juror’s vote, sight unseen – Nicole nullified Shannon’s and Will nullified Bunky’s, which would have been one more for each of them). Mike and Krista stayed loyal to Will. Kent, Sheryl, and Monica all voted for Will because they said he played the best game. Besides Bunky, only Autumn and Hardy voted for Nicole to win.

And that was the key – Will played the best game. He came into the house proclaiming himself a liar. He repeatedly told people he would lie. And lie he did. But somehow, some way, he convinced those same people along the way that he was telling them the truth. He purposely didn’t win a single HOH competition along the way, preferring to do all his maneuvering behind the scenes. And it worked like a charm. (In fact, I would add, it worked like a charm for one full season and all but one week of another!)

It takes a certain kind of personality to do what Will did. He needed to be charming on the one hand but absolutely cold-hearted on the other. It was a game, after all, and it had to be played like one. But the pieces in this game were human, and he knew they had to be played as well.

Nobody has duplicated Will’s feat, in Big Brother or any other game. And for that, he certainly deserves induction into the Reality TV Hall of Fame.

David Bloomberg is the Editor of the Reality TV Hall of Fame, and can be reached at RNO@pobox.com.

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