Correction

I have to issue a correction on Tuesday's piece concerning Big Brother.

In the article, I said that Big Brother aired two months after Survivor 1's finale. What happened was I was looking at Survivor 1's film date, not the air date.

Survivor 1 filmed from March 13-April 20, 2000.
Survivor 1 aired beginning on May 31, and ran through August 23.
Big Brother 1 began on July 5, 2000, the same day that Survivor 1 aired its sixth episode, in which Joel was voted out.

However, that sixth episode had drawn 24.5 million viewers. The first and second episodes drew 15.5 and 18.1 million viewers respectively, and from the third episode to the second-to-last, the ratings steadily increased from 23.3 to 28.7 million. The finale drew 51.7 million. It was not scored as part of the television season, because it aired in the summer, but had it been ranked, it would have come in as the second-highest-rated show of the 1999-2000 season.

The dates were wrong, but CBS' excitement and anticipation for Big Brother were the same nonetheless. That point remains unchanged.

On the date of the Survivor 1 finale, it was Day 50 in the Big Brother house, in the middle of Round 4. (In the week leading up to the Survivor finale, the Big Brother house was memorizing major highways with the object of being able to tell which interstates to take to get from one city to another.)

Thanks to Pinyan for catching me out on that. Apologies for the screw-up.