With the exception of those pillars, the nondescript jumble looks just like any other temporary building on CBS's Studio City back lot. It is a furiously hot day in Southern California's San Fernando Valley; we hurry past the building to the suites that lie just past it.

I'm dropped in an office, given a cup of water and seated before a television set displaying a four-way scene. "This is what goes out on the Internet," my guide says, "all four streams." It's the "Big Brother" house, live, the most monitored building in TV history. On one camera, Jordan, the self-absorbed stripper, is in the bathroom brushing her teeth. In another, Curtis, the indistinct lawyer, is combing his hair. And calm Cassandra's in the kitchen brewing coffee.

The fourth camera shows me a bedroom scene -- some residents are still asleep, and it strikes me that the others have just risen. "They're staying up all night partying," my guide explains, "and getting up really late. Big Brother's going to have to give them a gentle warning to get back on a more regular schedule. We run a skeleton crew from 2 to 6 a.m. It's hard for us to track them if they're up all night long." I can't take my eyes off the TV set. All they're doing is getting up. But it's positively addicting.

CBS launched "Big Brother" a month ago in the wake of a fanfare of publicity; the show was the network's second foray into reality TV, after "Survivor." On the surface, the shows bear some similarities: A group of people are plopped down, cut off from society and forced to make the best of a decidedly unnatural situation. How each behaves determines how long he or she gets to stay in the group.

But that's where the similarities end. "Survivor," with its faux tribalism and "Lord of the Flies"-esque who-should-we-vote-out-this-week aesthetic, seems almost anachronistic next to "Big Brother," with its 24/7 surveillance, 28 cameras and strictly circumscribed universe. If "Survivor" is a trial by fire, "Big Brother" is a crucible. And while CBS cobbles together an hour of programming from "Survivor" each week, "Big Brother" demands commitment from both its subjects and its viewers, with half-hour installments on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, and hourlong segments on Wednesday and Saturday.

It is an ordeal as well for its creators. To work such a miracle, there has to be a master magician behind the scenes, translating the dross of everyday life into something interesting enough to be broadcast on a national TV network. That would be Robert Caplain, the show's senior story producer and, in a very real sense, the living embodiment of Big Brother.

Although "Big Brother" has no story, and no script, someone has to weave the threads spun from each of those cameras into an interesting narrative. That's Caplain's job. After working on the standard fare of hourlong dramas and half-hour sitcoms, Caplain joined MTV's "Road Rules" from its third through eighth seasons, doing much the same thing he's doing now -- taking miles of footage and turning it into compelling viewing. But "Big Brother" is very different from its reality predecessors. "With 'Road Rules,' I'd have eight weeks between the time the footage was shot and the day it aired," Caplain says. "On 'Big Brother,' I have 12 hours."

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