At one point Tayleigh said to Jet that she was worried about not being entertaining enough, and Jet said that it's not the contestant's job to worry about being entertaining, leave that to production and be yourself.
Tayleigh was always one of the more interesting fish in the tank starting on day 1, the issue she had is that Ben would do attack therapy sessions, and even Sam would rant at them about not being interesting or entertaining when Charleston was there.
I felt the complete opposite from the four finalists this season.
They also had only four fish for way too long, eliminating Brian only for Jimmy to get kicked absolutely destroyed the balance in the show for half the season.
It felt like they had to squeeze blood from a stone to get an hour of liveliness.
This is a three part problem, one is that people don't tend to immediately want to just fuck over people they live with day to day, particularly when you know you have 40 days ahead of you living with them. Usually the first options are just ignoring or avoiding problems and only later escalating to arguing over what irritates you. This becomes even more pronounced and is visible in both seasons when one fish would lash out, they would immediately get dogpiled into oblivion. First Jon, then Letty are the two standouts from S1 and in S2 you rotated first to JC for the chip theft, Cole got isolated by the attack therapy, Jimmy for his spergouts, then Tay for being upset and crying while trying to give advice to Jimmy to restrain himself and not allow the rage outs to dominate his life when he was leaving. Since the cast was whittled down so much Tay was just the dogpile target for the rest of the show.
Since the cast got whittled down so hard and so fast nobody could play off each other and be amusing or funny any longer, and since one of the four was just the perpetual target they couldn't really play off each other. Shinji had trouble communicating because he was ESL, TJ always had problems talking since he was an autist, Trish and Tay were in a hard feud that lasted until Frank arrived which killed the feud but they never really reconciled and had a tense relationship into the ending. Tay and Trish would look out and empathize with each other such as when Frank literally threw Tay around by the neck or elbowed the shit out of Trish the "Kill a baby" challenge, or Trish telling Tay that Shinji and Oliver were about to hurl cat food on her when she was confined to the doghouse. But they never regained the ability to just sit down and have a good conversation or generate laughs for the audience.
The last part is that the production crew got up their own ass about "hell house" which polarized the cast into tense relationships with each other, only to never feed them anything beyond grits and loot crate ramen deliveries. The ramen wasn't even cooked half the time, the crew just eating the brick by breaking pieces off. They were fed nothing and acted exactly how you would expect, Sam and Ben later talked about this issue at the bar that the fish seemed far more lively and happy when they had been fed real food for a few days during the Donut on a nail challenge, and that they definitely wouldn't pull that stunt the next season. Jet and Ben were continously getting frustrated during the grits period that the fish weren't even interested in cash prizes and felt they were just going through the motions.
This season they'd give the cast something dumb like, everyone pretend to be a different race, and they'd run out of ideas and start repeating themselves within three minutes.
This is a sign that the bit being done is flawed in a severe way and shouldn't be run for 15-30mins straight, this would be a reoccurring problem with any attempt at comedy during the season, and is something Sam seems to be exposed as having a problem with via his standup attempts. Timing is everything in comedy and the challenges would just run on way too long and beat the comedy to death. A great example was the "Two Foreigners arguing with each other in two different languages" that Tai and Shinji had to do. It was funny initially but then it moved onto like round 5 or 6 and it just got extremely stale and everyone watching just wanted it to end. The grits thing is another example of a comedic bit that ran its course in a day or two but lasted weeks, the target window of this joke is the introduction that they're only going to eat grits and then the complaints the next day during meal time that day or the next.
