The Great, Cynical Fun of “The Traitors”
The reality-competition series “De Verraders” premièred in the Netherlands in 2021. Originally, Marc Pos, the creator, had designs to set the action entirely on a ship. He wanted to strand his contestants at sea as a nod to national lore: the seventeenth-century wreck of the Batavia, a Dutch East India Company ship. In 1629, the ship, carrying roughly three hundred souls, was headed from Amsterdam to its namesake port in Indonesia, when it struck a coral reef not too far from the landmass that would become known by the Europeans as New Holland, or Australia. What followed was the stuff of legend: the survivors were marooned, and the ship’s under-merchant, who had long been plotting a mutiny, orchestrated a series of killings, with everyone guessing who was in on it. Wouldn’t this serve as a juicy reference for Pos’s pop-psychology contest? How about throwing the losers into the sea? But the plan was ultimately too expensive. So production shifted the activity to a castle, all chandelier and shadow, and ordered a set of hooded cloaks for the contestants, setting the aesthetic that informs the now global franchise “The Traitors.”
Recently, Indonesia, in a kind of post-colonial cultural boomerang, announced its own version of “The Traitors.” About forty international adaptations are either airing or have been greenlit, putting the series on par with reality bigwigs such as “Survivor” and “Big Brother.” The premise of “The Traitors” is a gleeful ripoff of the parlor game known as Mafia, in which unwitting players must suss out the secret designated killers among them, not unlike what happened on the Batavia. At the start of the series, a small number of players are tapped to be the “traitors”—literally tapped, by the show’s host, on the shoulder during a blindfolded ceremony. The rest are “faithful.” Each night, the traitors meet in a turret to decide which players to “murder,” or eliminate from the game. By day, the whole group takes on missions, to build up a shared prize pot, with the traitors posing as faithful throughout. Then the group votes on whom to banish from the castle. Ideally, the faithful root out the duplicitous among them; if any traitors are left standing at the game’s fiery end, they can steal the prize money. Paranoia abounds! Did you hear So-and-So mention that there were “three” traitors? How could they possibly know that? Was that a slip? Did he look you in the eyes when he said, “I am one-hundred-per-cent faithful”? The descent into foolish and self-destructive groupthink provides the drama.
We know this game structure well: a group is dropped into a fishbowl environment with a charismatic host, who sets arduous tasks (physical, psychological, or both), and every evening the contestants convene, in a council format, to rant, cry, trade accusations, and, eventually, exile someone, all while a pot of cash sits on the horizon.
But however derivative of competition television “The Traitors” may be, the mood of the series is totally different—it is both quaint and greasy—because it so seamlessly matches our culture of incentivized fraud. Embedded in the production of the show is the feeling of being trapped in a hall of mirrors; scenes are edited flagrantly, drowning the viewer in red herrings. The manipulation tactics of the traitor are what you root for; the faithful exhaust you. “The Traitors,” which has won Emmys, is like “Jeopardy,” in a way. Jeering at the contestants for their naïveté and their shortsightedness, you feel like your brain is working.
The American version of “The Traitors,” which premièred in 2023, is hosted by a Scot, Alan Cumming. He is a scheming ringmaster, his eyes kohl-lined, his body wrapped in couture finery for which there are no descriptive words. He can roll consonants in a way that has not happened before in human speech. He makes a meal of the goth gig. He is too good to be doing this, to be on NBC on a Thursday. But his presence, his apparent delight as adults in scuba suits shoot themselves out of helicopters in pursuit of gold, is part of what makes the show so appealing. Against the singularity of Cumming, who brings the American players to his “home” country, for a game set in a handsome castle in the Scottish Highlands, the group always seems dinky, which is interesting, because it’s largely composed of B- and C-list celebrities.
The U.S. adaptation of “The Traitors,” with its gravestone and haunted-doll ambience, was seemingly lifted wholesale from the U.K. version of the show, which had been greenlit less than a year after the Dutch original. There’s just one critical difference: the U.K. version had cast all regular people, with regular jobs—except for that one magician, in Season 1. (“I’m one of the top magic creators in the world and I can read people; it’s my job,” he insisted, even though his predictions were regularly wrong.)
Initially, American producers tried to split the baby: half nobodies, half stars. But the hybridity didn’t take. The celebrities sucked up a lot of air, and so the show leaned in, switching to all-celebrity casts. The all-civilian versions—in the U.K., Ireland, New Zealand, and, at least at the beginning, Australia—have the thinnest veneer of social consciousness. For viewers, that is the undertow of “The Traitors”: the feel of a social experiment. Certain occupations, such as a teacher, make a contestant seem “smart,” whereas others—say, a lawyer—have an inherent shadiness. Women are suspected quickly. White people last long, etc. Communication is as fragile as glass.
What we have had in America, for the most part, is a social experiment conducted on a very particular population: reality-TV alumni. Instead of teachers and lawyers, the contestants are former “Bachelorettes” and “Biggest Losers”; the two main blocs are the “Gamers” (people who competed on shows like “Big Brother,” “The Amazing Race,” and “The Real World”) and the “Housewives” (self-explanatory). U.S. “Traitors” has been a reality show for reality-show stars, veterans of the genre, which is why it has typically been the least interesting version of the competition. The participants are dressed to the hilt by a surely overworked stylist, and they are only ever fake-indignant. The “Housewives,” such as Lisa Rinna (Beverly Hills) and Dorinda Medley (New York City), find themselves victims of a prejudice, of being seen as vindictive or else less strategically minded than the “gamers,” like Parvati Shallow, or Rob Mariano, a.k.a. Boston Rob, both alumni of “Survivor.” The winner of the last celebrity season was a traitor: Rob Rausch, a snake wrangler from Alabama, and a recent graduate of the romance den of “Love Island.” As a white-boy dreamboat in his overalls, he exploited the “low” reputation of dating shows in the entertainment hierarchy, managing to manipulate the faithful, winning in the end. On “Love Island,” he was seen as a liar, as a cad who, like, led on Leah just to dump her; on “The Traitors,” he committed a much worse betrayal, but to widespread approval and even admiration.
“The Traitors” is evolving. The U.K. is airing two versions this year: the typical civilian one, and its first celebrity spin-off. The Americans, in a twist, are the sole civilians. This season is called “The Traitors: New Blood.” (Celebrity traitors will return next year.) In “New Blood,” the fifth season of the U.S. show, “The Traitors” is now established enough for the cast to get self-referential. As the season opened, Kim Daily, a Black, sharply dressed trial attorney, said in her confessional that she would be telling the group that she is a basketball coach, obscuring her real profession. (Daily, obviously a viewer of the franchise, likely knew, too, that Black and brown players tend to go first.) But she can’t fool the cast, who immediately clock her as an intellectual threat; the traitors, sensing her influence over her fellow-faithful, murder her first. And so “The Traitors” is like a cheery hell for some players, who can’t, for all their suave maneuvering, escape the set rhythm of the show. Bias will win. Lessons are never learned. It’s great, cynical fun.
Joe Vanella, a crimson-cheeked funeral director from Long Island, is currently falling apart this season. He is playing the role of castle dad all while he connives in the turret alongside Tomica Adams, a pilot, and Katie Fites, a marketer. Joe is feeling guilty because he has grown close to Michael Foote, a gay lawyer and a faithful, befriending him by lying to his face. Sexuality and disability are the main “differences” that the production team allows to enter its ambit; the contestants rarely touch the third rail of race. (This past week, the banishment of the “Industry” actress Myha’la from U.K. “Celebrity Traitors” finally brought high-profile attention to the racial-bias question.) So Joe is flubbing missions, nearly blowing his cover, in one profoundly hilarious episode, as he tried to “murder in plain sight,” by tossing someone an apple. Overwhelmed, he eats the apple instead.
I don’t know if teary Joe is going to make it. I watch “The Traitors” with a blank mind, usually. But this week I found myself more alert to its theatre of lies. I think it’s because I’m observing the heated reactions to a film that owes some debt to reality television: “You Can See Everything,” Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s portrait of the former Theranos C.E.O. Elizabeth Holmes. One invective accuses the directors of destroying the truth-telling potential of documentary. Put another way, in bringing the footage into the realm of film, and not reality television—his domain—Fielder breached some ethical standard. This is a ridiculous complaint, though it’s rooted in a hunger for veracity that one can instinctively understand. In the film, Fielder installs himself at a beach house with Holmes; her partner, the vexing Billy Evans; and their two children, as she prepares to go to prison for fraud. He gets so close to Holmes, who claims innocence, whose steel opacity makes her his double, that he can no longer see her. And so, in Fielder fashion, after Holmes goes to prison, he restages or re-creates reality in order to try to get to some truth about her. He makes a Rube Goldberg machine of reality. But that doesn’t work. Can we trust him? Can we trust Holmes? Can we trust the relationship between Holmes and Evans? Is she manipulating her documentarian, her husband, or vice versa? If you saw that film expecting to gain an answer about Holmes’s innocence or culpability, then, yes, you came up frustrated. You want to live in a faithful world of councils, discernment, and banishment. But you are in the turret, the hall of mirrors. ♦