It's the live Wednesday night broadcast and tensions are running a little high -- between CBS and the houseguests.

The housemates have bonded and Julie Chen is not having a good time.

Chen is the host of the tackiest infomerical on TV. After explaining that tonight, for the first time, we "have a choice of three houseguests to banish from the 'Big Brother' house," Chen gets a malevolent gleam in her eye. "But first, we have a surprise for the houseguests."

The consensus among the houseguests? "So what?" Eyes roll. No one looks at the cameras. They just glance at each other and smirk. The houseguests hate Julie. And she hates them.

"You're probably wondering why there's a TV in the house," she says.

"Eh," they say, not biting.

"Well, it has to do with tonight's challenge. We've got a great surprise for everyone in the house. But in order to get the surprise, you must first watch a tape."

Silence. The last thing the housemates want is another "surprise" from CBS. After five long seconds of dead air that Chen is at a total loss to fill, one of the houseguests (who is off-camera, probably being threatened) drawls, "Great," like he means it.

"Don't say great yet!" bleats Chen. George squints. Is she stupid?

The challenge, which will be decided by majority vote, is this: The group can watch a tape of themselves making their banishment nominations from the week before. If they do, they get a "surprise." ("It'll be really great, you guys will really love it," says Chen.) Or don't watch the tape and don't get the surprise and you'll never know what the surprise was.

This pathetic threat elicits chuckles from the houseguests.

She gives them a few minutes to decide. It takes them two seconds.

"No way."

"I say life's good either way," Josh says, "without the crap they give us."

"Especially not knowing what the 'surprise' is," Curtis snorts.

Everyone cracks up.

"Too bad for Julie," laughs Josh in the strange accent they've all adopted. "No drama."

"I can see the surprise being Mega and Jordan waiting outside to say hello to us," Eddie says.

"It just goes to show what happens in the Red Room might just wind up in our faces," whispers Cassandra.

"They may just show it to you," Josh adds.

Julie returns, seething. "All right, no one wants to watch the tape, so apparently no one wants the surprise. Except Eddie, maybe ... "

He raises his arms in an exaggerated shrug.

Jamie? "Nope."

Cassandra? "Absolutely not."

"OK," says Chen, sounding like she's just swallowed glass.

The camera cuts back to the studio. "They'll never know," sniffs Chen.

On banishment night, we get a montage of each nominee's lowlights of the month. Karen's first. We see every bad thing Karen ever said about anyone topped off with a crying jag over feeling "gossipy."

The nominees are then given 30 seconds to talk about how they feel about the nominations. No one says anything bad. So CBS retaliates by showing a montage of Cassandra that paints her as a judgmental outsider who doesn't want anyone to have any fun.

Chen tries to get Dr. Drew Pinsky to say something bad, but he won't either. "We just heard Cassandra say that she didn't want to be involved in the alliances. Do you believe that?"

"Oh, yeah," he says, "that's vintage Cassandra."

Then Chen asks if he was surprised that the shut-ins didn't take the surprise.

Dr. Drew was not surprised.

Furthermore, he was moved by Karen's, Josh's and Cassandra's gooey goodbye speeches. It gives the group "closure," he says.

"They're close enough now that they can bring up these spontaneous feelings about each other," he says.

Chen doesn't really understand. She's never had spontaneous feelings, though we have them about her.