Are you faithful to The Traitors?

Why this show is so brilliant and addictive

Warning: contains spoilers

The Traitors is the BBC’s latest murder mystery game closing out its second season with the finale airing on Friday, 26th January.

Set at a castle in Inverness, the show revolves around 22 strangers completing mad (sometimes non-sensical) missions to accrue money in a prize pot alongside guessing which of them are harbouring secrets and murdering fellow castle-dwelling contestants. Each night, the traitors (sexy cloaks and all) choose who to murder in a secret turret, while the faithfuls have to decipher which of their fellow players are betraying them behind closed doors. Collectively, they choose to banish the person they deem to be a traitor at a nightly roundtable extravaganza. On leaving, the banished reveal their true status. If a traitor remains in the group’s midst at the end of the game, they steal all the money. Otherwise, cash is split between all remaining faithfuls. Think real life Cluedo with less weapons, more cloaks and relatable suspects.

I gather if you’re reading this, you already know how this show works. If not, what are you playing at? Start streaming immediately. (But wait until after watching to read the below — there are spoilers).

If you’re already a fan of the show, I imagine it’s near impossible to hear the above paragraph in any voice except Claudia Winkleman’s. She is the real driving force behind this show’s magic. Not only is she impeccably dressed in argyle knits with her signature fringe holding firm against Scotland’s blustery skies, but quick-wittedly, she runs a tight-ship. Knowingly, she looks to the camera’s fourth wall, validating to us with a signature smirk how absolutely outrageous the whole thing is. Her equilibria of sincerity and sarcasm keeps the drama high; you feel her genuine frustration for them (sometimes, at them). She spoke last season on How To Fail about why she doesn’t let herself get close to players so the game can run properly. She’s wry and wonderful; unapologetic and empathetic in equal measure. And, the only person we’d trust at the helm of something so camp on prime time TV and not bat a heavily-kohl’d eyelid.

Housed on BBC One, there isn’t an ad break or paid partnership in sight. So far, it has avoided the winner-takes-all-the teeth-whitening-ads-and-plays-on approach we so regularly see in other reality TV. The choice of civilian casting is strong; an antidote to the House of Commons roll-call appearing regularly in the jungle. We see people that remind us of friends, families and colleagues.

This year’s cast is particularly spectacular. Paul personally reminds me of the kind of man who you can never officially file for workplace misconduct yet has somehow eroded every bit of female confidence by telling women to ‘calm down’ on the regular. He leant into the villainous element of his traitor role; thought he had a ‘game plan’. (He didn’t). We despised his sleazy, despotic quips to the camera. We wanted justice for those of good faith. So when we got it, boy was it euphoric.

From afar, you can speculate: it’s all a bit nuts. Brian had a paranoid implosion; even masochistic Paul had his fair share of deteriorations. We willingly allow for the show’s intensification. Why else would accept the forest green cloaks? the strange orgasm noise in the opening credits? the dramatic covers of Blondie’s One Way or Another while Diane lunges in her bedroom? This is a purposefully heightened environment.

As an audience, we feel respected. The producers let us in on the secrets from the get go; we watch, foreboding the mischievous twists to come. The producers demand respect in return by insisting we engage on a rationed basis. They demand this show is too decadent for binging, releasing episodes on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays only. (Personally I think it should be Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays). We are left yearning for more; clutching to the mere morsels of murder clues in our agonising 5 day hiatus. We exchange our predictions in every WhatsApp group and at every water cooler in the run up to the next week’s trilogy. Discussion is what makes this show so popular.

Discussion and gossip creates tension in our group of players too, building to the crescendo of savagery at the nightly roundtable. Noah Yuval Harari, author of Sapiens stated the importance of gossip as the foundation of our species’ survival in the cognitive revolution. He describes how gossip enables judgement and hierarchies to form; it is responsible for how humans interact in society. What we are watching is the stuff of politics and policy making. We are witnessing our inevitable regression to instinctive behaviours and the potential demise of our future world in the form of a game show. Bleak, brilliant and utterly fascinating.

Traitors taps into our most alluring (yet easily diminished) human characteristics: confidence, integrity, intuition and persuasion. The crux of keeping a place in the herd is exercising the perfect balance of all of four. It’s a conformity experiment which exemplifies peer pressure. A test of how you hold your own without exiling yourself. A modern day Solomon Asch.

It’s psychologically one of the most intelligent reality shows in a long time. Hats off to the producers, for using every tool in their mind-bending shed from casting, traitor selection to the shield conundrums and mission-based tension as well as Diane leading her own funeral march. Talk about iconic.

The show reminds us it’s very hard to continually lie and the difficulty of repeated ruthlessness. (Harry’s tears after banishing Jonny are a clear example). Yet, for players on the dark side it becomes addictive. Power can never succeed alone; those at the top need the unknowingly faithful fodder to fuel their master plan. To win as a traitor relies on strategy, deceit and as my ever-evolving favourite, Andrew would say: “chucking people under a bus”.

The chosen traitors (even the lovable, puppy-faced ones like Harry) leave us with moral questions. In season one we saw Wilf questioning if he could rob money from the kind-hearted strangers he’d grown to love over the course of the game. Harry now faces a similar fate. I was team Haz at the start. However, to defend his faux-faithful position he has had to slide upwards on the sadist scale. So, as much as I think he deserves to take the money, I don’t want him to. (Especially not after the penultimate episode where he said he’d use it to pay for a dinner bill when others had much better ideas). Ultimately, this is a simple game of good versus evil. I for one, would like to see a feel-good outcome.

Even the people I know who despise reality TV enjoy Traitors. It’s taken the best bits from other shows: the backstabbing of Love Island, the extravagance of Strictly, the heart of Bake Off and the head to head arguments of Alan Sugar’s Apprentice and wrapped them all up in a unique concept.

It is a cautionary tale of our silly demise if we are withheld full information and left to our own devices. A modern day Lord of the Flies where we witness humans crumble in a pressure cooker of psychological uncertainty. Although the only person who ever truly holds the conch is Claudia.

It wouldn’t surprise me if over time, this show loses traction, like all reality TV eventually does. The casting will have to get better and this year’s cohort will be a hard act to follow. Maybe, they’ll quit while they’re ahead. Perhaps they’ll offer us a celebrity version? Maybe the rights will get sold to Channel 4? Or Queen Claud will pass on the crown to a new presenter? At which point, I’d have my doubts about watching. Until then however, I remain one-hundred percent faithful.