Big Brother is watching again, and Ten has NRL rights in sight

Paramount Australia hosted its 2026 upfront at the Big Brother house on the Gold Coast, so it only stands to reason that the show’s return to its original network was the thematic focus of Paramount and Ten’s presentation … even if the show is technically part of the network’s 2025 slate.

But with live nominations, live evictions, and 24/7 live-streaming from the original Dreamworld site (although the original house burnt down in 2019) it marks a very welcome return to the freewheelin’ Big Brother of old — although hopefully with less turkey slaps.

Original Big Brother host Gretel Killeen is returning to Ten as well, but she’ll be steering clear of Big Brother, instead hosting the new season of The Traitors.

This is season three of the show, but for all intents and purposes it’s a complete refresh, built off the back of the format’s runaway success in the UK. Rodger Corser hosted the first two seasons in 2022 and 2023, but audiences weren’t interested.

“We were ahead of our time because it was a few years ago now,” Ten’s president Beverley McGarvey told Burrowes in an interview you can hear in full on the Mumbrellacast (or play below). “And, Traitors is now the biggest format in the world … I think the show just didn’t work for a range of reasons, and we’ve got it right this time.”

Timing is everything with these things. The finale of the UK iteration aired overnight — and international interest is at fever pitch.

Interestingly, the show isn’t called Celebrity Traitors as in the UK, despite the cast featuring luminaries such as Ian ‘Dicko’ Dickson, comic Rhys Nicholson, Olympian Shane Gould, and a bunch of Survivor alum. And speaking of Survivor, this season will see the debut of new host David Genat, after Jonathan LaPaglia was blindsided by the network earlier in the year.

Bev McGarvey addressing the upfront (Mumbrella)

Also resurrected for 2026 is Millionaire Hot Seat, which was dumped by Nine at the end of 2023, and now lives at Ten, with Rebecca Gibney hosting.

“People think they know who she is … you’ve grown up with her to a certain extent, but you don’t know her really until you see her a scenario like this, every single night with lots of different people,” Tamara Simoneau, vice president of content told Burrowes. “So that’s going to be a surprise for the audience to get to know her in a way that they don’t. ”

Ten will also debut a pair of docu-shows: Sydney Harbour Cops, which is like real-life Water Rats, following the police who patrol the harbour; and The Animal Sanctuary, set inside Tasmania’s family-operated Bonorong Wildlife Sanctuary.

Paramount+ will debut two new dramas: Dalliance, a show about dating in your sixties — starring Hugo Weaving and Georgie Parker — and Two Years Later, a show about dating in your thirties, starring Brenton Thwaites and Phoebe Tonkin. Variety is the spice of life.

And in terms of sport, Ten has the UFC from January, the Women’s Asian Cup (hosted in Australia), two back-to-back A-League men’s soccer matches each Saturday, NBL double-headers on Sundays, the Australian MotoGP, the Formula 1 in Melbourne next March – and the NRL?

Well, it’s a possibility. Burrowes posited to McGarvey that the recent rise of Formula One makes it a better fit for Paramount than the NRL, saying “if you were to chase one hard, it feels to me like your appetite presumably would be more F1.”

McGarvey replied: “Well, yes and no. The F1’s incredible and it is a global phenomenon. But, there’s more volume in NRL and the NRL is great and they’ve had a great year … the code’s been really great this year, and it’s done really good numbers.

“So honestly, you know, if Santa could give me it, you’d take both, obviously. But I don’t know that that’s a problem we’re gonna have to suffer through.”

When asked if she’d yet had conversations globally about the appetite for the organisation in chasing NRL, McGarvey said “we will certainly have those conversations. We look at every available rights and especially local ones”.

She continued: “We look at them tactically. You know, it’s only been a few months” [since the Skydance merger]. She also noted that, with international boss Kevin MacLellan in Australia for the upfront, “it’s a good time for us to start thinking about what that might look like for everyone.”

Elsewhere, during the wide-ranging interview, McGarvey hosed down rumours that she is in line for the top job at SBS — saying “not that I’m aware of. I’m very busy in my day job.”

Okay, back to the Big Brother house for the rest of the upfront announcements.

Rod Prosser hopes it’s not just Big Brother watching in 2026

And while we don’t know yet which contestants will be entering the Big Brother house on Sunday night, we know there will be a tonne of contextual advertising, with ‘Own The Moment’ and ‘Pause to Shop’ features coming to the show, after the latter debuted on MasterChef Australia earlier this year.

McCain is the first sponsor to sign up to this new frontier of lounge-room advertising. Basically the 2026 version of product placement, Paramount’s contextual advertising suite will enable brands to sell to viewers with “contextual relevancy” – which may or may not mean bored Big Brother housemates munching on fish fingers and oven chips.

Elsewhere on the advertising side, Paramount has expanded its partnership with LG, which in September saw Ten’s linear station join LG Channels, the manufacturer’s free ad-supported TV offering.

Now, Paramount Australia will become the exclusive sales representatives for LG Channels, which boasts over 130 streaming channels.

The company has also teamed with attention measurement firm Adelaide, moving beyond traditional metrics to offer Adelaide’s ‘AU attention score’, which Paramount claims is the industry’s “most widely adopted attention measure” and fills “a critical gap” in streaming measurement.

Paramount Connect — the company’s converged advertising trading technology, introduced earlier this year — now allows advertisers to access and activate single campaigns across Ten’s streaming platforms and Paramount+. In the future, this will also incorporate the linear stations, for cross-screen buying across all Paramount’s platform.

Finally, in case it’s not crystal clear already, Think TV — the collaborative body designed to drive free-to-air TV — is dead.

But that doesn’t mean the spirit of collaboration seen between the networks at this year’s upfronts isn’t real. It’s just evolving, as Paramount’s chief sales officer Rod Prossor told Burrowes.

“The moment for the dismantling, if you like, of Think TV, was probably right  — and it was no one’s fault, certainly wasn’t the networks or the Think TV body itself or anyone that was involved in it. It was just time for evolution,” he said.

“Everyone needed to sit back, pause, and also just have a look at — not just the market — but the ecosystem that we now operate in, and think what is the best form of industry marketing body that we would like to be a part of?

“I think the exciting thing is that the commentary that you would’ve heard at the upfronts around collaboration – that’s real.

“I mean, we’re definitely all in a very good place, by way of discussions, by way of potentially collaborating on some big initiatives that I’m excited about.”

Let’s leave it there – with the Australian TV industry in perfect harmony. At least, until Ten steals the NRL.

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