In the world of reality TV, there are (basically) two types of shows: competitive reality shows where everyone’s after a cash prize, with the hope of being asked back for future seasons, and candid reality shows full of personal drama (and probably outfits), where being asked back for future seasons is the prize. The ultimate distinction might be the democratic process: Unlike Big Brother contestants, Vanderpump Rules and even Bachelorette co-stars aren’t technically allowed to vote one another out of the show.
On the Peacock streaming service, there’s a show where the two meet. It’s called The Traitors.
Situated in a Scottish castle and hosted by Alan Cumming in full razzle-dazzle regalia, The Traitors pits Real Housewives against Survivors; Bachelor himbos against aggro Challenge veterans; and extremely beautiful real estate agents like Chrishell Stause from Selling Sunset against somewhat less beautiful royals like British Lord Ivar Mountbatten.
Like competitive reality TV, the goal at the end of Traitors is a cash prize. But like candid reality shows, the secret goal of everyone in the game is to get a little bit more famous, parlaying their Traitors stint into more projects, and maybe even future appearances on this or other shows!
For reality TV fans, The Traitors is essentially an all-star game, the best of both worlds of reality TV. But as with so many of the reality shows, from Love Is Blind to The Bachelor, the more the players know about the show, the less organic and more alien it becomes. Now in its third season, The Traitors is still as entertaining as ever, but in an unexpected, crash out kind of way.
The worst part of The Traitors are gamers figuring out the game
Despite all of Alan Cumming’s outfits, The Traitors is ultimately a game about elimination, where players vote one another out. There are 23 players this season, and from those their host has selected a few to play as Traitors. The traitors’ job is to eliminate their fellow contestants, known as Faithfuls. Each night, there’s a roundtable vote where Faithfuls try to vote out Traitors. And after each vote (called a banishment), the Traitors secretly meet and vote out a Faithful (called a murder). Faithfuls hope that they can vote out all the Traitors by the end of the season and split a cash prize, and Traitors hope to sow enough discord and doubt to make it to the end and keep the money for themselves.
What’s made The Traitors a breakout hit through its first three seasons are the players.
The show’s ingenious casting department plucked some of the best reality television stars — Housewives, Survivors, Bachelors, et al. — from across networks and types of shows. In doing so, they’ve created a fun dynamic where, as in the second season, you get a cutthroat gameplayer like Parvati Shallow, one of the most ruthless Survivors ever, teaming up with Real Housewife Phaedra Parks, one of the canniest candid reality stars in the Bravoverse‚ to betray the rest of the castle — then you set them against someone like “Pilot” Pete Weber, an earnest if self-righteous former Bachelor.
What’s emerged this season, and seems certain to continue with each future installment, is that the competitive reality show contestants (or, as they call themselves, “the gamers”) go into the game with soft alliances with other fellow gamers, and the implicit understanding to vote out non-gamers. These are people who went very far on Survivor, Big Brother, and The Challenge. They’re accustomed to and practiced at the backstabbing and mind games that come when your fellow cast members explicitly have the power to get rid of you. It’s natural that they would try to figure out how to increase their odds on Traitors, and that banding together to vote out fellow players — regardless of Traitor or Faithful status — would certainly do that. Once they weed out the amateurs, the thinking seems to go, they can set their sights on each other.
The problem is that as gamers continue to “figure out” the game, it doesn’t necessarily make for fun television. It even cuts short some arcs that could have made for really great TV.
Two of the initial Traitors — Big Brother’s Danielle Reyes and Survivor’s Carolyn Wiger — this season are gamers. After the first episode, three more gamers were added to the show with one of them — Survivor mainstay “Boston” Rob Mariano — is secretly selected as another Traitor, with former Drag Race star Bob the Drag Queen rounding out the four. (Drag Race is a competition show, but RuPaul — not the other queens — ultimately decides who, shantay, gets to stay.) The gamers are inescapable. And much has already been made of the fact that two of the first three eliminations this season were Real Housewives, and seven of the first 10 eliminations were non-gamers.
By voting players like the Housewives off — only New Jersey’s Dolores Catania remains of the original four that were cast — the gamers have increased their odds of winning, but they’ve also robbed us of Dorinda Medley being messy at the roundtable. Medley, the first player to be murdered, is sort of like Marvel’s Incredible Hulk; anger, inevitably preceded by a lot of alcohol, transforms her from a mild-mannered, rich widow who lives in the Berkshires into a rage-filled, slurring, bleach-blonde barbarian who says things like, “eagles don’t fly with pigeons” and “face of an angel, mouth of a serpent.”
Where Survivor and Big Brother alums are strategy savants, Medley and the other non-gamer reality show stars, like Chrishell from Selling Sunset and Gabby Windey from The Bachelor, are good at making sudsy, silly television. They know how to fight for the cameras, turning molehills into mountains. They’re the pinnacle of reality TV personality hires. Getting rid of so many of them — Real Housewives of Dubai’s Chanel Ayan! Potomac’s Robyn Dixon! Dorinda! — before they can make good TV is no doubt a producer’s nightmare, especially when you consider that the show airs on Peacock, the streaming home of every Real Housewife fight that’s ever aired.
If one wanted to watch a show that’s all strategy and littered with pre-made alliances, they’d likely already be tuning into The Challenge, one of the few television programs that airs during the rare hour when MTV isn’t playing reruns of Ridiculousness. The Challenge began as an all-star competition for Real World and Road Rules alumni, and now it’s a farm team for competitive reality — Challenge stalwarts Trishelle and CT won Traitors last year. It’s now aired 40 seasons, largely composed of people whose entire adult careers are going on The Challenge. They go into each new game with already-made cliques and pacts against first-timers, and almost every season is dictated by an alliance, which tamps down the predictability of the game. It’s become a boring question of whether the dominant coalition of players will or won’t win the game.
That said, The Traitors may have some guardrails as to what the gamers can accomplish with their take-no-prisoners-bad-TV strategy. For starters, the gamers don’t really know what to do with Tom Sandoval, a.k.a. the doofus at the center of the Bravo adultery controversy known as Scandoval. Sandoval, perpetually sweaty and always sauntering around the castle like a surprised possum, has no real concept of who may or may not be Traitors, but that doesn’t keep him from sharing every theory that enters his mind with anyone in his vicinity. The gamers cannot decipher if Sandoval is an idiot, a genius, a Faithful or a Traitor. It gives me some hope that even the most seasoned gaming veterans cannot fully comprehend the confusing layers of idiocy that some candid reality TV stars possess.
The saving grace this season? The Traitors are pretty bad.
While the aforementioned gamer creep threatens to rob us of silly confrontational television, there’s been one thing stopping them and making season three entertaining: the Traitors picked this season are dysfunctional clowns.
Bob the Drag Queen, before his elimination in episode four, (thankfully) seemed more infatuated with the idea of making good television — fighting with Zac Efron’s brother Dylan, being shady to some contestants while making all the girlies loyal to him, giving biting confessionals — than employing a winning strategy.
Danielle, a mastermind on Big Brother, is a portrait of delusion. She believes she’s turning in a superb acting performance and fooling the rest of the players. Everyone around her thinks whatever is happening with Danielle is bizarre. Her performative appearances at breakfast — when the assembled Faithful and unsurprised Traitors learn who was murdered the night before — evoke the worst community theater you’ve seen. If you ever find yourself needing to hide a body, Danielle is not the friend you call.
“Boston” Rob, a Survivor winner, keeps drawing attention to himself by pointing fingers at whoever he perceives as a threat, including his fellow Traitor Bob. Rob also carries himself with the serious air of a mafioso, so even if you’re not as savvy as a gamer, one might think that the man with an accent straight out of The Town talking about the game as if he were the target of actual mob hits could be a little suspect. While his machinations have won out over the last few episodes, Rob’s over-aggressive, excessively Masshole play has put a giant target on his back.
The only Traitor playing a decent game is Carolyn, but that’s because no one takes her seriously, not even her fellow Traitors. With intense vocal fry, she bemoans every murder, rightfully recognizing that keeping the less sharp Faithfuls around ultimately benefits the Traitors. But her fellow Traitors all seem intent on “creating chaos” instead of listening to Carolyn’s sound strategy. Part of that may be due to delivery; like a pterodactyl, Carolyn has a penchant for squawking and groaning when excited, or even at rest.
Heading into episode seven, Danielle has tried to eliminate Carolyn, because in her brilliant thespian mind, she needs to recruit a new Traitor to defeat Boston Rob. Danielle could have easily and more discreetly played along with a vocal segment of Faithfuls who don’t trust Rob, but then how would she get to exercise her acting chops? Meanwhile, Carolyn is now going after Danielle in return, which has ruined Carolyn’s under the radar gameplay. And everyone in Cumming’s castle seemingly suspects Boston Rob — but he can’t do anything because his two traitorous teammates are so desperately horny to get each other eliminated.
For all the worry about too much strategy, The Traitors has, for now, become a thrilling comedy of failures. The only fitting end would be that no one wins the cash prize. I know that the rules in place ensure someone always wins, but I also wouldn’t put it past this gaggle of fools to figure out a way to make this happen. I’ll be watching every second, rooting against them all.
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