First ‘Big Brother’ Winner Eddie McGee Thinks His Season Was Terrible

The Gist:

• Big Brother Season 1 winner Eddie McGee became a TV actor after the show.
• He had roles on TV shows like Law & Order and Desperate Housewives.
• He has never seen Big Brother, but he thinks his season of the CBS show was “boring” and “terrible.”

With Big Brother 25 a wrap and Big Brother Reindeer Games on the horizon, now’s a good time to look back at the history of the CBS reality franchise. For starters, where is the first Big Brother winner now?

That would be Eddie McGee, who made it to the very end of Big Brother’s only viewer-controlled season. “I was a 21-year-old snot-nosed kid from Long Island, so just that was able to just be who I was, and hold what integrity I had,” Eddie told Entertainment Weekly in 2022, reflecting on his time on the show. “I was the same person from the day I went in until the day I got out.”

Eddie has been acting on screen since his time in the Big Brother house. He landed an agent in New York after winning Season 1. 9-1-1 viewers have seen him play Frank, the therapist of Jennifer Love Hewitt’s character. “I’ve done a couple of episodes for them on the show, which is fantastic,” he told EW.

The Big Brother 1 winner also filmed a recent TV pilot called Eddie’s. “It’s kind of like a modern-day Cheers, starring me and George Wendt, who was Norm on Cheers,” he explained.

Eddie's IMDb filmography shows he also scored roles on Law & Order, Desperate Housewives, NCIS: Los Angeles, Elementary, and Chicago Med after Big Brother. He also guest-starred in episodes of FBI: Most Wanted, Awkwafina Is Nora from Queens, and The Equalizer.

“The next project I have coming out is called The Creepy School Bus,” Eddie said. “It’s based on this viral video series that I did with a buddy of mine, Paul Hough, on my YouTube channel, called Don’t Turn Around. We’ve been doing these little horror stories. Our targeted audience is middle school and high school kids. It’s kind of like a Goonies meets Aliens. The Creepy School Bus audiobook comes out later this year. It’s actually going to be in every school library in the country.”

As of the time of that EW interview, Eddie hadn't seen an episode of Big Brother, despite being the show’s inaugural winner. “I never watched my show, never mind somebody else’s f--king show. My show was like watching f--king paint drying, man. My show was boring. It was f--king terrible, from what I heard. I don’t know. I never watched it. And it’s funny, people asked me, years later, like, ‘You never watched it?’ I go, ‘No, I lived it!’”

Eddie also revealed there’s “no f--king way” he’d be a Big Brother houseguest again… unless producers pay him the big bucks. “If they said they were doing all-winners, I’d be like, ‘No problem, but I’m going to need $100,000 upfront.’ Without sounding like too much of an a--hole, I was the first one, I was the first winner, and everybody’s going to be f--king gunning for me, man. I go in there, I know I’m a dead man. I’m first one out. So I’ll do it, but I got to get $100,000 upfront.”