Happy Traitors day! It is Wednesday my dudes and that means we’ve got another triple helping of The Traitors lined up for an evening’s viewing over the next few days.
We’re now past the halfway point in the game and the show has gone from strength to strength as it has gained millions of viewers and started the month very strongly.
Back when the first series was releasing, the contestants were worried that the show wasn’t going to be adopted by audiences, but it’s turned into a beloved staple of the BBC’s January lineup.
However, for some fans of The Traitors, the show’s own success is causing problems for the cast as they’ve got another factor to navigate in this grand game of social deception.
David Craig of the Radio Times pointed out that in the latest iteration of The Traitors that the contestants are starting to use things they picked up from previous series to inform their decisions, which he suggested is making them play the game ‘more like TV producers’.
Take Elen, for example, the actual Welsh contestant in the show who was ushered out of the door rather early.
She remembered that in the previous series of The Traitors team Traitor turned into something of a boy’s club, to the point that host Claudia Winkleman called it out both in the show and outside of it.
Elen suggested that this would mean the show would make an effort to pick more women as Traitors this time around and she was absolutely right since series three of the UK show went for an all-woman lineup of Traitors.
Winkleman also called out the series two Traitors for killing off older players, so perhaps it’s not surprising that the oldest woman on the show, Linda, got picked to be a Traitor.
It was an astute observation and one the rest of the table would have done well to think about, especially because when Anna rejected being recruited by the Traitors, they said they wanted a ‘strong, independent woman’ which might have set off alarm bells as to who kept murdering people.
However, if a clue about this series is based on what happened before that might be messing with the game.
If players are thinking like this and it’s working, what does that have do to the show?
If the cast of The Traitors series three are bringing their knowledge of previous games to the table and it’s working, then Craig’s argument would seem to hold weight that what happened before is influencing the current series.
On the other hand, The Traitors is still great fun and has to stride the balance between being a reality show and a game show.
If I may add my own personal bugbear here, the format is designed to fill 12 episodes and get to the final firepit rather than be the best version of a social deduction game it can be.
The Faithfuls have nothing to go on and the show is designed to keep team Traitor in the game until the end.
But ultimately The Traitors is a TV show and it does need to act like one, picking a team of Traitors at random and letting the game play out as normal might not make for as entertaining fare as what we get normally.
There’s a reason why it’s the show the Beeb has chosen to open the year twice in a row now.
The Traitors continues on BBC One at 9pm.
