Television regulators, citing the need to preserve human dignity, ordered changes in France's hit reality TV show "Loft Story," including daily timeouts for contestants who were being filmed 24 hours a day.
The High Audiovisual Council also ordered the station airing the show to change the game's rules to ease the psychological burden on contestants.
The moves were announced Tuesday amid a mounting debate over the program, including a demand by Culture and Communications Minister Catherine Tasca for regulators to step in.
"Loft Story," which began airing daily more than two weeks ago, has broken viewership records. But critics have assailed it as "trash TV" and "audiovisual pollution."
Up to 80 protesters tried to storm the set north of Paris over the weekend to "liberate the hostages" inside the loft, but security guards and riot police pushed them back.
"Loft Story" started with six men and five women, aged 20 to 29, sharing a house north of Paris and courting for cash. The prize, a $400,000 house, goes to the man and woman left after the nine other contestants have been voted out by fellow roommates and TV viewers over a 70-day period.
The winners then must spend six months living together.
Critics say the program's contestants resemble guinea pigs whose mating for money degrades everyone's dignity.
France's audiovisual regulatory body, which grants broadcast licenses and is known as the CSA, convened a special meeting Monday -- the second since the show began.
Dominique Baudis, head of the CSA, said his nine-member panel ordered "daily rest periods of a significant and reasonable length" to provide contestants with "time and places in which they are not under public observation."
To help further "ease the psychological pressure" on them, the CSA also "inverted the logic of the show," Baudis said. "Instead of asking, 'Who do you want to kick out?' they have to ask, `Who do you want to keep?"'
The small, privately owned station airing the program, M6, will make the changes, Baudis said, though it was unclear when the new rules would take effect.
In the show's first week, the CSA warned M6 about "Loft Story" contestants' excessive use of tobacco and alcohol and asked that the announcer stop directing viewers to a satellite station and an Internet site that air the program, including its steamiest scenes.
