Big Brother hits its 25th anniversary on Saturday, July 5, just five days before the premiere of its new season on Thursday, July 10. And the show’s Season 1 viewers would hardly recognize the CBS reality show in Season 27. Big Brother’s first season, which premiered weeks after Survivor’s debut, was vastly different than the version of the show fans know and love now.

In Big Brother’s series premiere, the Season 1 houseguests arrived in individual SUVs — escorted by police on motorcycles! — but that motorcade might have been the most high-budget component of the season. Compared to modern-day Big Brother houses, the Season 1 domicile was bland and basic, with all of the atmosphere of a dorm common area. (There was a vegetable garden and a chicken coop, however.)

Thus began a marathon of episodes. For that first season, Big Brother aired six nights a week, meaning viewers had to devote much of their weekly TV viewing to the show if they wanted to see all 70 episodes — yes, 70 episodes — and catch all the action — or, more accurately, all the inaction.

San Francisco Chronicle critic John Carman called out Season 1 for its boring storylines, compared to shows like The Real World that had fewer and thus better-edited episodes. “Is it possible that watching 10 strangers make a potato-powered clock is one spud shy of Tiffany entertainment on CBS?” Carman wrote.

And yes, there were only 10 contestants in that first season. One standout was Jamie Kern Lima, a former beauty queen who later returned to headlines in 2016, when she sold her IT Cosmetics to L’Oréal for $1.2 billion and earned approximately $410 million from the deal, according to Forbes. (She’s currently tied with Kylie Jenner on Forbes’ list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women.)

Also, it was the public who “banished” houseguests in Season 1, and those eliminations came every two weeks. The houseguests could nominate their fellow players for elimination, but the final decision lay with viewers. (A contestant named William was the first person banished from the show, and he actually pumped his fists in jubilation.) And with viewers in charge, many of the more antagonistic Season 1 players were voted out early, robbing the show of drama.

The first season had a different theme song — with a Muzak-level saxophone solo — and one of Season 1’s many bizarre house activities involved the final five houseguests penning lyrics for that theme and then recording a music video. (Season 2 introduced a new theme song, perhaps because viewers couldn’t un-hear the so-called “Big Brother 5” singing “Into Our Lives” horribly off-key.)

Julie Chen’s hosting performance got a lot of flak from viewers and critics, and she later told Entertainment Tonight she was too beholden to her original news-anchor ambitions. “I was trying to envision, like, they can’t say no to me at 60 Minutes one day because I did this,” she recalled. “So I was trying to be very 60 Minutes on Big Brother. And it was the wrong lane to be in. It didn’t work. … My mistake was, I didn’t fully embrace it for what it was, which is why they ended up calling me the Chenbot. I was so stiff and robotic in front of the cameras.”

Chen wasn’t even Big Brother’s sole emcee like she is now. At first, a “Big Brother reporter” named Ian O’Malley offered house tours and interviews with family members. As producers fiddled with Season 1’s format, however, O’Malley was there one week and gone the next. “I know the show sucked. And still does,” O’Malley told Reality Blurred in 2017. “I look back at my six weeks on the lot at CBS and BB with a mixture of relief that I got out relatively unscathed.”

Chen also brought on “Regina Lewis from America Online” — yes, that’s AOL, another sign of Season 1’s turn-of the-millennium times — as a regular guest to talk about fan chatter and the show’s 24/7 webcasts. “The online activity is unprecedented,” Lewis claimed, dubiously, in one segment.

As Season 1 slogged on, viewers revolted, some even calling the show a “train wreck” online, as the Los Angeles Times reported. Big Brother producers even broke its own rules, allowing outside contact by letting contestants talk to family members, and introduced twists like offering houseguests $50k to walk away and be replaced by a new contestant. Amid such machinations, viewers sensed network execs and Big Brother producers’ “naked, unadulterated fear, nay, panic,” in the words of one viewer. Someone (or some ones) even hired a plane to fly over the house, towing a banner reading “Big Brother is worse than you think. Get out now.”

Viewers were certainly getting out. The show’s ratings took a dive in Season 1, going from a series premiere that attracted 22 million viewers to an installment that got beaten by a COPS episode the following Saturday, as Entertainment Weekly reported at the time.

But then-CBS boss Les Moonves — who would marry Chen four years later — refused to say die. “I’m not going to accept that Big Brother didn’t do so well,” he told reporters at a Television Critics Association event at the time, per TV Guide. “Big Brother did just fine and, in fact, improved our summer ratings and our summer demographics.”

Moonves did have notes for producers, however. He said Season 1 was “[not] cast very well” and that the gameplay was “not as well-thought-out” as that of Survivor. “I don’t think [producers] followed up on some of the more interesting things that were going on in the house,” he added. “In reviewing some of the tapes later on, there were more provocative storylines that could have been followed that were dropped.”

Season 2, premiering exactly a year after Season 1, mixed up the format. This time, the show aired three times a week, and the houseguests competed for power (and the all-important Head of Household position) and voted on each other’s eliminations, now called evictions.

The Chenbot, however, remained.

Big Brother, Season 27 Premiere, Thursday, July 10, 8/7c, CBS