This review contains spoilers for the AU, UK, and US versions of “The Traitors.”
“The Traitors” has taken the world by storm.
In the United States, the show has already seen three Emmy wins — for host Alan Cumming, the casting and for the show itself — in two seasons. In the United Kingdom, nearly a seventh of the country tunes in three nights a week to see which “faithful” has been murdered and whether a “traitor” will be banished. The original Dutch show, “De Verraders,” has seen itself remade in different formats in 28 other countries since it premiered in 2017.
In America, it offers the chance to see your favorite stars from other reality programs — “The Bachelor,” “Survivor,” “Big Brother” and less competitive ones like the Real Housewives franchise — face off in a castle in the Scottish highlands. Everyone is under suspicion, no one is ever truly safe.
In the UK, it brings drama almost never seen in unscripted television — a magician tearfully revealing another contestant is secretly his girlfriend, a woman and man disguising that they are, in fact, mother and son, a faithful sister stabbing her traitor twin in the back — to that same castle.
It’s brilliant, engaging television.
It is also an utterly terrible game.
From twists intended to help seasons differ, strategies that develop naturally and the game’s outright construction, “The Traitors” is not a game built to be played, designed to be fair or intended to be won.
“The Traitors” is, at its core, Mafia — a party game with assigned baddies who kill an innocent — in Mafia, a townsfolk, in “The Traitors,” a “faithful” — every night, trying to stay hidden amongst a town that democratically eliminates someone at the end of every day. In Mafia, if a mafioso makes it to the end, they get to boast to their friends. In “The Traitors,” if a traitor makes it to the end, they take whatever money is in the prize pot, leaving any surviving faithful penniless.
It’s a relatively simple game and can be good fun. Turning it into television, however, has a surprising number of pitfalls.
Replacement Traitors
Unlike Mafia, “The Traitors” has to hit an episode count. If they run out of traitors on episode seven, the show can’t function. Therefore, if a traitor is voted out, the remaining traitors have the chance to recruit a replacement. This is an option until the finale.
This does not work.
In both the first and third seasons, a traitor has been voted out ahead of the night of the last murder, leaving only one traitor in the game. When only one traitor is left alive before the finale, they must meet with a faithful to deliver an in-person ultimatum: join me or die.
This rule isn’t bad for most of the season, but it goes on for too long.
Recruiting an additional traitor works when it means three of 15 players are traitors. It even can work when it means two of nine are traitors. It doesn’t work when it means two of six — nearly a majority — are traitors. If they choose to work together, the traitors need only convince one faithful to their side and both sail to the end.
The only saving grace, if you can call it that, is that it’s currently disadvantageous to go to the final two with another traitor (more on why later). This creates its own problem, though.
Predictable Strategies
Both UK season one’s Wilf and UK season three’s Charlotte elected to recruit someone who was unlikely to survive the end game. As they were targeted for banishment around the roundtable, both recruits elected to throw the traitor who recruited them under the bus, gifting the faithfuls wins they otherwise may not have earned.
This is not just a display of dubious sportsmanship; it’s bad, predictable TV.
The audience follows the traitors far more closely than the faithfuls — they can provide more insight since they know the reasons behind the murders they commit and there are fewer of them to provide that insight. Seeing traitors lose can be satisfying, but having a majority of seasons end in them losing less for gameplay reasons than for rules and revenge-centered ones is a betrayal of the viewers.
It doesn’t work for the faithful either.
A revolving cycle of traitors means there is little reason to ever vote one out. You don’t win more money for doing so, nor do you cut down the number of traitors. At best, you are recruited, halving the ways for you to be eliminated from the game. At worst, you create yet more work to do, introducing a new, potentially more effective traitor to the game.
As this becomes more widely acknowledged, it puts the show’s future in peril. “The Traitors” succeeds on the drama created by players trying to identify the traitors and the fights that emerge. If those fights are slower to manifest, lose their importance in the eyes of the viewers or are simply less passionate as faithfuls recognize finding traitors isn’t the most important part of the game, the show falls apart.
If anything, the players currently most incentivized to vote out traitors are other traitors.
Neither the British nor American editions of the show have seen multiple traitors as the last players standing, so it’s not definitively clear what would happen in that scenario. In Australia, however, three traitors managed to make it to the end together, leading to the “traitors’ dilemma” — the chance to share or steal the prize pot. If all traitors choose to share, they take home equal portions of the pot. If there is a mix, only the traitors who steal from the prize pot take home money. Neither of those possibilities happened. All three traitors chose to steal, which meant the pot went… nowhere. No one took home any money, no one won. Even the producers didn’t win — after the season saw more fans infuriated by the gameplay than intrigued, the show was canceled in Australia.
Individualism
That risk inherent in reaching the end with a fellow traitor — that everyone might lose — means traitors are incentivized to betray one another. Despite being presented as a team, they are discouraged from playing as one.
This encouraged individualism stretches beyond the traitors, especially at the end of the game. Although many faithfuls maintain the game should be played as a team, it’s difficult to justify that mindset when they don’t know for certain who is on their team.
In the endgame, where players must unanimously choose to end the game for no one else to be voted out, this facade of togetherness disappears and has done so very visibly in two recent seasons.
In the second American season, two faithfuls who previously played together on The Challenge seemingly worked as a voting bloc to work to a final two, regardless of whether they thought other players were traitors.
This strategy had a bevy of benefits.
They were much more likely to make it to the final two because they knew they had a vote on their side each time. They were far more likely to win with another faithful because there would only be one person besides themselves left in the game. They also earned more money, because they were splitting it fewer ways.
In last week’s culmination of the third British season, two faithfuls, Jake and Leanne, did the same. While they did not know each other before the game, Jake spent much of the early game targeting one specific traitor and Leanne appeared to make herself the most trusted player in the game. There was little doubt the two were faithful, so they reaped the same rewards as the Americans after voting out two faithfuls to end the game, just in case five of the last seven eliminations were somehow all traitors.
Meta Strategies
This, again, hurts the show. An end game seemingly built to allow more players to win instead results in a slow trudge to the final two. It also means the audience’s favorite players are that much less likely to win. The drama the show intends to create from the “will they/won’t they end the game” they designed is undermined by the inevitability that they won’t.
These current meta strategies have not just detracted from the quality of the gameplay, they have also hurt the casts and the show itself.
Smart players, or those considered to be smart, are often banished early on because of the perception they would make good traitors. Outspoken players most likely to cause drama are also frequently among the early boots. The traitors aim to keep in the players who trust them most, decreasing the level of conflict and protecting players who prefer to follow, not lead.
The last two faithfuls left in the game are regularly the most loudly wrong or wrongly suspicious — the former often being frustrating to watch and the latter having little to no chance of winning. Both vectors of elimination currently advantage players less worth watching.
In the U.S., players’ reputations from other shows follow them into the game, meaning big names are often eliminated early. In the second and third seasons, players from the “Real Housewives” franchise have been targeted because of the fear that they would link up with other members across their franchise. The threat of a voting bloc means fans of those shows see their impetus for tuning in eliminated before they get hooked on the concept.
The most concerning aspect of the show, however, is not these constant flaws. What worries me most are the heavy-handed, sloppy attempts to push back against them.
Inconsistent Clues
“The Traitors” features very, very, very little in the way of confirmation clues.
In each season of the UK version, the traitors have been given a secret task to “kill in plain sight.” In season one, a player kissed on the cheek as they left the castle for the night would be killed; in season two (in both the US and UK), the traitors needed a faithful to bring a “poisoned chalice” to their lips setting them up to die at the end of the following challenge; in season three, the traitors had to write four names on a painting to put them into a high-stakes card game where the losing player would die.
These are meant to give the traitors a chance to be caught in the act. It happened once, but has mostly gone unnoticed by the faithful. For season three, at least in the UK, the production team decided there should be more. In the second-to-last episode, they introduced the “seer”: a player who could definitively learn one player’s alignment.
There are worlds in which that succeeds. There are paths to that working. That could be a good decision.
In the game’s current state, however — a game with next to no confirmation — providing outright confirmation for one player is both too powerful and too punishing.
In the UK, the seer picked a traitor. This was a death sentence for both of them. The traitor’s only viable defense was accusing the seer back.When leaving even one traitor in the game means you lose, a faithful cannot justify leaving either in the game.
What made this even worse was a rule change for the season: in the end game, eliminated players do not reveal their roles.
Unbalanced game design
“The Traitors” gives more power, unsurprisingly, to the traitors. The game is not balanced in the first place. This only further unbalances it. A traitor becomes free to rally harder against a faithful than they otherwise may because they know they won’t be caught having rallied against a faithful. It also amplifies the extent to which a faithful can only justify leaving two players alive at the end. Traitors will know this and, unlike the faithful, know who the traitors are, which means they can more easily push for eliminations that benefit them.
With the seer in play, this is similarly unbalanced. As a faithful, knowing a player is a traitor and saying so will get you killed. If a faithful seer sees a faithful player, the two of them can work as a voting bloc to win. A traitor seer can either confirm a fellow traitor as a faithful or confirm a faithful as a faithful — either way, they put themselves in position to work to the end with the player of their choice.
This is not inherently bad, but it discounts the entire rest of the season. The most clearly faithful player could lose, not because they played badly, but because the seer confirmed a different player. A traitor who plays perfectly can be revealed as a traitor through no fault of their own or can wind up not in a final two alliance. The seer’s current design and when it comes into play do not elevate, contextualize or improve the game, they become the game.
While twists that provide confirmation have been questionably balanced at best, the most egregious example of confirmation didn’t come from a twist at all.
In the most recent UK season, Leanne was targeted for murder at the final seven. Like every other murdered player, she was sent into a confessional room where she read a letter from the traitors informing her of her death. Unlike every other murdered player, Leanne was not out. She had a “shield” immunizing her from murder, meaning she returned to the game.
While seemingly innocuous, this fundamentally breaks the game. At no prior moment in the entire run of the show did a living player receive confirmation that something, anything happened to a living player — banished players reveal their alignment before they depart, but you can’t unbanish someone.
Leanne learning in no uncertain terms she had been targeted for murder changed the state of play. No, she was not automatically believed because of it, but having an incredibly rare piece of conclusive evidence denied to her face despite her empirical knowledge it happened led her to respond with an even greater ferocity than she normally did.
This knowledge and her reaction to it, in some eyes, seemed to confirm her as a faithful. Another faithful found this suspicious, arguing she could be a traitor who chose to recruit, and found himself banished for his troubles.
This is not an example of confusion around a twist or a twist modifying the game. This is an example of two game mechanics — the shield and recruitment — not being clearly understood by the players in the game.
“The Traitors” remains tremendously entertaining. Putting people in a castle and subjecting them to massive amounts of paranoia makes for excellent drama. Without changes to the game, however, the show will not maintain its current remarkable success.