I’m begging Big Brother to stop bringing back “Icons” and expecting the rest of the house to treat them like royalty.

This season gave us Rick Devens and Dee Valladares from Survivor, alongside Angela Murray, a returning Big Brother favorite. And instead of watching a bunch of new players figure out the game together, we spent most of the summer watching people try to get in their good graces.

Why were we letting Survivor players run the Big Brother house? Why were people so eager to work with them instead of getting them out? The whole point of Big Brother is that nobody should be safe just because they have a résumé.

The problem wasn’t necessarily that the Icons were there. It was that their presence became the center of the season, and most people seemed content to orbit around them.

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I’m not saying production rigged the season for the Icons. But I am saying the show gave us plenty of reasons to side-eye the setup.

The Icons were the only players eligible for the opening Head of Household competition and were among the first eligible to compete for the Time Capsule power. Production’s defense is that their notoriety also made them bigger targets. Fair enough. But when the returning players already have name recognition, experience and built-in influence, giving them special opportunities on top of that is certainly a choice.

And when Rick Devens ultimately wins both the game and America’s Favorite Player, it’s hard not to wonder whether the season was built to make the Icons the main characters from the beginning.

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The most frustrating part is that this season actually had potential. There were moments of tension, ridiculous personalities and genuinely entertaining gameplay. But every time things threatened to get interesting, the season seemed to settle right back into predictability.

Older seasons understood that the entertainment came from watching people lose their minds while trapped in a house together. Fights, grudges, blindsides, arguments over absolutely nothing. The kind of drama that made you wonder how these people were going to coexist for another 24 hours.

Now, everyone seems so conscious of their game and reputation that the messiness feels increasingly short-lived.

And before anyone says good gameplay matters more than drama, I agree. But this is still reality television. I want strategy and people being absolutely ridiculous. I want to be surprised. I want to disagree with someone's decision and immediately need to see what happens next.

I don’t want to spend an entire summer watching people protect their positions until the finale.

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Rick Devens won $750,000 and America’s Favorite Player, taking home another $50,000. I can acknowledge that he played a strong game. I just don’t need to pretend I enjoyed watching it unfold.

This season had the cast, the returning players and the potential for chaos. Instead, it gave us a season that felt more interested in celebrating its Icons than letting the game speak for itself.

Three months. A historic season. And somehow, I’m mostly left wondering what could have been.

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