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

By all rights, Will Kirby should have been one of the first people inducted into the Reality TV Hall of Fame. In Big Brother 2, he took control of the game and never let it loose, all the while telling people he was lying yet somehow making them believe him. Sometimes, however, proper recognition takes a little while. So now is the time.

Unfortunately, the time picked was the time Will was voted off of Big Brother: All-Stars. It was not intentional – I fully expected him to be moving on when I originally prepared this induction. Instead, this is his coda.

But let us give him his due – he should have been booted from All-Stars in the first few votes, as he was the only winner in the cast and the other players should have recognized him as the most dangerous person there. Realization came late to Janelle, but she finally figured it out. In the meantime, though, we are here to recognize what he did way back in Big Brother 2.

While Big Brother was in its second season in the U.S., Big Brother 2 was truly a new and different game. In the first season, houseguests nominated each other for eviction, but the viewing public actually voted. So Will had nothing on which he could base his strategy and play – it was all new and wide open.

Shortly after entering the house, Chill Town was formed. This group was made up of Will, Mike Boogie, and Shannon. Will and Shannon were drawn to each other and spent a fair amount of time canoodling. Meanwhile, the three of them acted like they controlled the game.

It didn’t take long for the rest of the house to revolt. Mike won the first HOH competition and nominated the then-unliked Nicole and the very well-liked Sheryl as a pawn. The house decided to show Chill Town who was in charge, and voted off Sheryl. Thus began the decline of Chill Town.

Ironically, the impending demise of Will’s alliance signaled the rise of Will himself. When he was nominated against girlfriend Shannon (the term “showmance” had not yet been invented), he convinced her that if he stayed around instead of her, he could do more damage in the house. So she left, but not before earning herself a Reality TV Hall of Shame Moment for her use of Hardy’s toothbrush to clean the toilet.

With Shannon gone, Chill Town was down to Will and Mike. While Mike still thought of himself as a “star” and the others as “extras,” Will began to let his egotistical humor work for him instead of against him. Among his classic lines was the one describing himself as “Half man, half amazing!” And at one point he asked himself, “Who can I fake bond with tomorrow? Who can I fake bond with tomorrow?”

When Kent won HOH, Will really moved into the type of action that won him this Hall of Fame induction. He convinced Kent and others that he could never ever win because everybody hated him. He also made a deal with Kent for immunity. It was a lie, of course, but it bought him the week while Kent targeted Mike and Krista, with Mike going home.

Hardy won HOH next and nominated Will against Kent. But Will continued his campaign of “woe is me, I can never win.” Kent, on the other hand, told the truth and exposed many of the various alliances. Indeed, Will even said in the diary room that Kent had the whole house figured out. But the Big Brother game, like politics, doesn’t reward telling the truth, so Kent was sent packing.

Will was busy laying out the groundwork for the rest of the game. He had made amends with Nicole, complimenting her and bowing to kiss her feet. At the same time, he let her in on some of the shifting alliances in the house, thus “proving” his trustworthiness to her while at the same time making her more suspicious of the others. He did the same with Hardy. By the time he was done, he had turned Krista from an ally of those two into a sworn enemy (he had plenty of help from Krista herself, of course).

That was when Will pulled another trick out of his hat. Krista and Monica (Krista’s lone remaining friend) called Will over to the hot tub to attack him for revealing Krista’s secrets. Will saw it coming and decided to turn it into a whole-house meeting instead, then deftly sidestepped the issue, shifting the target elsewhere.

As the game continued, Will convinced Nicole that he was loyal to her – despite the fact that he continually admitted to being “evil” and a liar. It was an awesome strategy that nobody except Will himself (in All-Stars) has duplicated to this day. Tell people you’re a liar and they suddenly believe you’re being honest to them. Brilliant!

At the same time, Nicole believed she was using Will, all the while telling us her real allegiance was to Hardy. The problem was that whatever she thought she was doing, Will was doing it better.

Weeks passed. Will didn’t win HOH, but allowed others to win it and do his dirty work. He was nominated by Hardy against Bunky, but Will made a deal – he promised not to nominate Hardy and Nicole if Will won HOH, and they agreed to let him stick around. It was a great deal for Will – a classic among his moves, really – and a terrible one for Hardy and Nicole. The only way they’d know if he was lying was if he won HOH and nominated them both, in which case it would be too late (remember, this was before vetoes). Indeed, Will told viewers in the diary room that he was lying through his teeth, and would happily stab them in the back. Will acknowledged to us that he would have made any deal he could to stay in the game, and Hardy was dumb not to recognize this. So he shook Hardy’s hand and looked him in the eye, which led Hardy to tell Nicole, “He shook my hand. I believe him.” Thus was the magic of the evil doctor.

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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