Should The Traitors be fixed?
When you turn your single-player mode into a co-op game
This post contains spoilers for the first three British series of The Traitors, the last of which has just aired. If you do not want to be spoiled, or have no interest in the greatest reality TV show ever made, turn back now, traitor.
A scriptwriter friend of mine, trying to justify his dubious watching habits, will often say that reality TV edits are a masterclass in storytelling. This is a feeble excuse for his behaviour, but he is right that reality producers have a knack for splicing often unremarkable footage into a coherent story with a good climax. Like a journalist, they cut and paste and twist. And the results are usually compelling, if not exactly edifying.
Whatever worthier aim are claimed by the creators, these things are ultimately shallow entertainment. Big Brother is not a kind of panopticon experiment, merely a peep show. That’s triply true for the litany of romantic offerings – Love Island, Married at First Sight, Too Hot to Handle – the purpose of which is not to encourage love matches, long-term relationships or self-improvement, but to generate hot goss.
Even so, since The Traitors was launched in late 2022, I’ve thought it might be something more. While it’s hardly the first reality TV show to be structured around regularly eliminating contestants until only one or two are left, there is a tang of respectability to it, not least because of its upper class environs on a Scottish country estate and the fact it’s based on a parlour game. Regular people don’t have parlours. But watching the third series released this month, you can see the stresses between its dorky origins and the requirements of reality TV. I’d prefer that the dorky wins.
First, a recap of the rules. We begin with 22-ish contestants on a Hogwarts-esque train ride towards that Scottish castle. To quote myself from last year:
“Most of these players will continue the game as ‘faithfuls’, but on the first day three will be literally tapped on the shoulder to secretly become ‘traitors’.
“Divided up into ostensible teams, they will take it in turns to eliminate players from the game. The whole group, which includes the disguised traitors, vote at an open table every day to ‘banish’ a player from the castle. Then in the night that follows the traitors meet in private to select a player to be ‘murdered’. After each elimination, the lost player’s allegiance is revealed (explicitly for the banished, implicitly for the murdered).”
As you may gather, the traitors have a massive information advantage over the faithful. Arguably it is the fact that the majority have so little to go on that makes the viewing so compelling, though it’s also frustrating: players seize on the tiniest of details and blow them out of scale, or employ spurious logic to justify hunches. Earlier seasons often had people picked off for character quirks (a trend that has receded, either due to producer meddling or new players learning from previous seasons). The smarter, less emotional people are often picked off too, rather suggesting that the Great British public doesn’t trust girly swots.
The game is not about logic, but social dynamics – namely how skilfully you can earn people’s trust. That is true of Mafia, but it’s especially true of The Traitors. While the parlour game is a genuinely team effort, with faithful and traitors winning or losing as a group, The Traitors has a cash prize only for those left in the game at the end, split between traitors if any have survived, or faithful if all traitors have been eliminated. In Mafia, the faithful win as a team if they catch all the traitors, while the traitors win collectively when they outnumber the faithful.
This means that the aim of the game is not really to catch traitors, but to ensure you don’t get eliminated or banished. In the latest British series, one player even made the solo nature of the game explicit. Predictably he was autistic, and was soon voted out. But it’s something that has struck me from the first season. While players are encouraged (and genuinely seem to buy into) the moral framing of good versus bad, the actual game is basically solitary. Alliances are usually temporary and expedient, even between the traitors, who have a habit of killing each other off – often in mutual suspicion.
The upshot is that some winners of the game appear not entirely deserving. In the first British series at least two of the victors were completely carried to the end. Many more players stick around just because they lucked into befriending a traitor on the first day, after which they are shielded from murder as an ally who can help protect the traitor from banishment. The faithful who are the best at finding traitors – and sometimes even the most effective traitors – are rarely those who are best placed to win the prize at the end. This is unsatisfying.
The point was rammed home at the end of the most recent British series. After the last traitor was eliminated in a producer-frustrating series of events, the final round comprised four faithfuls. Usually at this point the tension rests on whether the faithful will clock the one final remaining traitor. But in this case you just had to watch the faithfuls keep eliminating one another, which they did both to reduce the risk of hidden traitors and so the remaining two could increase their share of the prize fund. And I don’t think the two who won were the most deserving of the winnings.
That’s the game, of course. But I wonder if it would be a better game if it was a genuine team event, where all the faithful or all the traitors won, irrespective of which individuals had been eliminated. The prize could still be split, creating a genuine incentive to be recruited to the traitor side, where you’d get more money per person. (And charismatic players would still have more media opportunities after.)
Would the producers go for it though? They have at least made the money-earning challenges more relevant to the main game, provoking conflict among players by forcing them to compete over shields, and even challenging traitors to sabotage efforts to win prize money. These were good changes. Viewers would like it even more if we were guaranteed an ending that didn’t lead to dud players scooping all the money.