Lisa de Moraes
Lisa de Moraes
The TV Column

TV: ABC live-streams ‘The Glass House’

Nicole Wilder/ABC - Viewers are in charge of “The Glass House,” ABC’s real-time reality competition, scheduled to debut June 18.

As CBS’s campaign to shut down next week’s scheduled debut of ABC’s “The Glass House” gets down to the wire, ABC went ahead Tuesday and launched the new reality show’s first live-stream from inside its house — nuking much of CBS’s argument in the process.

Turns out, the real-time competition series “The Glass House” — in which 14 fame-seeking narcissists live and compete for a quarter-million dollars in a totally wired house — is not, as CBS accuses, a knockoff of its “Big Brother.”

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It’s a parody. “Big Brother,” for starters, is hosted by CBS’s “The Talk” ringleader/CBS Corp. chairman’s wife, Julie Chen, whose stiff-ish performance as show host/den mom has earned her the nickname “Chenbot.”

Tuesday’s live-stream of “The Glass House” was wrangled by a disembodied, computer-generated-sounding chick voice that, on Twitter, had earned her/it the nickname “FaRi,” as in “faux Siri” — Siri being the name of the iPhone 4S personal assistant.

“Here. We go players. We’re about. To go. Live,” FaRi told the 14 “Glass House” players at the top of the stream.

“If you are not illiterate, you have been eliminated,” one competitor said, summing up the players.

“I am going to. Ask you and the fans the. Very same question. All you have to do is. Answer it for. Yourself,” the disembodied voice explained.

All questions were multiple-choice. Webstream viewers were asked to play along, and results would be compared.

Question No. 1: “What’s the best way to break up with someone?”

Glass House-rs were told to go to a different room of the house, based on the answer they’d picked. In this case, all but one headed to the room designated “In person,” though one chick went to the “Over the phone” room. Most of the viewers went with “In person.”

“Nobody here ever had a crazy boyfriend?” the lone chick in the “Over the phone” room asked defensively.

“Please reset to the living room” FaRi ordered.

Question No. 2: What is most important to you in a mate?

Most Glass House-rs headed to the “Sense of Humor” room, where the chicks, having lost their initial nervousness, began to pose, flip their hair and blow kisses at the camera. One lone, overweight guy headed to the “Looks” room, and one chick struck out alone for the “Intelligence” room.

By the time FaRi read the third question, the competitors were talking over her nonstop, and the chicks were spending a lot of time posing for the cameras, making hand-hearts, and hanging from the necks of the guys. One of the guys gave them a run for their money in the vamping department, however, opening his shirt to show off his chest hair and smacking himself on his rump once or twice.

Our merry band of ABC castmates seemed in perfect harmony when it came to a question about the most inappropriate thing you can do on a first date — flirt with someone else, natch. And all but one of them thought living with someone of the opposite sex was okay if you’re not married to that person — prompting the question: What is that one competitor doing in the co-ed “Glass House”?

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