In the latest episode of The Traitors UK, the final eight players gathered at a candlelit dinner party. After weeks of fraught gameplay, they shared what they would do with the prize money if they were to win. Their teary stories were emotional: donations to disability charities, IVF journeys, putting kids through university and long-overdue honeymoons. The message was clear: these are good people. But suddenly, the game recommenced and we once again wondered: are they?
“To finish that dinner and say goodnight to everyone, knowing one of them might be ‘murdered’ that night …” says Minah Shannon, one of the titular traitors who will be secretly deciding which faithfuls to kill off that night, before breaking out into laughter. “Oh my god, I’m a psychopath!” Alongside her fellow traitors, the 29-year-old call centre manager from Liverpool has betrayed and backstabbed her way through the game. But far from being considered a villain, she has become a fan favourite. This surprising turn is mostly down to the format of The Traitors. For its viewers, the show upends the usual experience of watching a reality TV show – and that’s what makes it so captivating.
Since the first iteration of The Traitors – “De Verraders” – aired in the Netherlands in 2021, the show has become a global reality TV phenomenon. The Traitors UK is one of 33 international series, including versions from the US, Australia, Canada, South Korea, Russia, South Africa, Finland and India. (Some of the international shows feature famous people and a British celebrity series is expected in 2025.)
Part of the show’s success is because the format avoids some of the pitfalls that reality competition shows often succumb to. Fatigue is one of them. With the exception of Alexandra Burke duetting with Beyoncé, The X Factor usually got more boring when it reached the live shows, partly because it was usually pretty obvious who was going to win. And the final episodes of Big Brother and I’m a Celebrity, when there are fewer contestants and opportunities for drama, can be a bit of a slog, too. On The Apprentice, the most controversial and useless contestants return for the final, because frankly the show doesn’t quite work without them. In contrast, The Traitors gets significantly more intense as it reaches its conclusion. During the nail-biting final episodes, you never know what’s going to happen and the game can change in an instant – as in the first BBC series, when one of the all-time great traitors, Wilf Webster, appeared to have the game sewn up but dramatically fell at the final hurdle. The audience has no control over what happens – there is no public vote, so being a “fan favourite” doesn’t equate to becoming the bookies’ favourite, and just one tactical error can send even the best players crashing out of the game.
In some ways, the premise of The Traitors is reminiscent of the reality medium’s origins, where most shows were described as a “social experiment”. The crucial difference, though, is that shows such as Big Brother still relied on standard moral codes, where backstabbing and deception would see someone becoming unpopular. We saw this in the very first series of Big Brother UK back in 2000, when “Nasty” Nick Bateman was ejected from the house in a cloud of villainy for plotting against his fellow housemates with a smuggled pen and paper.
The Traitors challenges these norms, because lying is a foundational part of the game. The show allows its players and audience to let go of the “rules” and morals they’ve been taught to abide by since childhood, where we learn that lying is one of the biggest societal taboos. And if that wasn’t thrilling enough, the fans also get a birdseye view to the deception – we see a carefully edited version, where potential pitfalls are foreshadowed before they occur to even the most perceptive players. As the all-knowing, all-seeing eye, it allows us to indulge in the fantasy that we would be the best player of all. As we watch, we feel powerful.
In the current series of The Traitors UK, one of the most entertaining storylines has come from Charlotte Berman – a faithful-turned-traitor who has been faking a Welsh accent the entire time to appear more trustworthy. (There was one particular moment where Charlotte, then a faithful, cried in the kitchen that she was “just trying to be herself!” in her fabricated Welsh accent.) This might sound counterintuitive to say about a show where players tell such bizarre lies, but The Traitors still stands out because of the authenticity of its contestants.
In the goldfish bowl of the game, the players not only seem unaware of how the public will perceive them, but they don’t seem to care. It’s a breath of fresh air on a backdrop of reality TV shows like Love Is Blind or Love Island, where a lot of time is devoted to working out who is there for the “right reasons”, versus those who want to use the show to sell teeth-whitening strips and “wellness” laxatives on Instagram. On The Traitors, however, success is not won by public vote or even by doing the “right” thing, so players have very little control over how they’re perceived. This avoids contestants playing up to the cameras too much, or covertly trying to self-produce the show to give themselves a leg-up on the reality TV-to-influencer pipeline.
The authenticity that the format’s intensity causes is also helped by the casting. On the BBC show, great effort has gone into finding people who represent the whole of the UK. This series alone, we’ve seen retired opera singers, vicars and former army officers – exactly the type of people we aren’t accustomed to seeing on reality shows.
As the series finale approaches, fans are gearing up for a tense, gasp-inducing week of Shakespearean twists. In some ways, the show’s success highlights that a lot of reality TV simply doesn’t feel challenging – or surprising – any more. Despite being a camp, glitzy and slickly produced show, The Traitors still somehow feels like a nod to the medium’s more humble beginnings of filming a bunch of strangers in a house together and seeing what happens. For anyone who is worried that reality TV is becoming predictable and stale, The Traitors is a reason to be faithful.
