Other than a few brief successful variations on familiar themes, the reality-competition TV market hadn’t really seen a true breakthrough hit in a generation. Think about the shows that people still truly watch: Survivor debuted in 2000; MTV’s The Challenge started in 1998; the U.S. version of Big Brother turns 25 this year; The Amazing Race got going in 2001; Top Chef began cooking in 2006; and the baby of the bunch might be RuPaul’s Drag Race, which premiered 16 years ago. And then crickets. It truly felt like there wasn’t going to be another reality competition show that made international waves until fate, and Alan Cumming, intervened.
By combining elements of other reality shows, the sharply defined personalities of their most popular contestants, and party games like mafia, Peacock’s The Traitors became a smash, topping streaming charts with more impressive totals in each of its three U.S. seasons. The third, which wraps up on March 6, opened as the No. 1 streaming show on any platform the week it premiered, beating the second-season kickoff by 67 percent. Why are people drawn to this blended smoothie of shows they know and love? Sometimes great things just taste great together.
The Traitors is based on a Dutch show called De Verraders, but the U.S. version hews more closely to the British one, all the way down to the same location (Ardross Castle in the Scottish Highlands), goofy missions, and even the props, although the Brits don’t get the glory that is Alan Cumming over-pronouncing the word “murder.” The concept is wonderfully simple: Twenty contestants (with three added in post-premiere in the third season) compete in tasks to earn money to grow a pot that will go to whomever remains alive or un-banished in the finale.
Three competitors are chosen at the beginning of the season in a sort of reality duck, duck, goose game by Cumming to be “Traitors,” tasked with “murdering” one of their colleagues every evening. The “Faithfuls” are then asked to suss out the betrayers in their midst, voting to banish one of their own before every murder based largely on vibes. It’s a deceptively straightforward game but one that plays right into the personas that these people have built in their time in the public eye, allowing them to take skills learned on Survivor, Big Brother, and even various Real Housewives iterations.
The 20 contestants of the third season featured four former Survivor players, three Big Brother players, four Real Housewives, and folks from Vanderpump Rules, The Bachelor, Selling Sunset, Summer House, The Biggest Loser, Total Divas, RuPaul’s Drag Race, and other shows. It is a greatest-hits package of reality stars in casting alone, but that doesn’t necessarily make it new. Past programs have brought back familiar faces and usually asked these contestants to just be at their weirdest in front of the camera like a twisted variation on The Real World or run back what they did that made them reality stars in the first place.
The brilliance of The Traitors is how it allows its players to lean into their personalities in the actual gameplay itself, using them to further their goals as Faithfuls or Traitors. How different is wooing someone on The Bachelor from convincing the round table that you’re a Faithful? How different is forming an alliance on Big Brother from making sure you have the votes to not be banished? And how different are the blindsides that turned Survivor into a hit from Traitors throwing each other under the bus?
This plays out in minor and major beats in the gameplay of each season. And it’s worth noting that the mansion on the show is not where the players sleep and live. So they aren’t interacting 24/7 like people on Survivor or Big Brother. Instead, they use what they glean from missions and conversations around the mansion but often fall back on what they’ve seen on TV. When Carolyn Wiger turned to Dylan Efron in the ninth episode of this season and asked him to use what he knew of her personality from Survivor when he voted, it really captured something essential about the gameplay of this show: These people aren’t strangers to each other or us. They come with televised baggage that shapes the direction of every aspect of the game.
But it’s been a little bit of a blessing and a curse for The Traitors this season in that contestants seem to be getting smart to the formula, often turning their suspicious eyes to the players who have been the most successful on other games. The producers couldn’t have been happy when beloved reality-TV all-stars Wes Bergmann (The Challenge), Derrick Levasseur (Big Brother), and Rob Mariano (Survivor) went home in succession. And some have complained that the format of the show forces out its most interesting players because it rewards the quieter/boring ones, those who are less feared than people who have already proven themselves to be effective liars on other programs.
Games like The Traitors are often tweaked over the years, and there could be ways to fix this, including perhaps an all-competitors season that doesn’t mix non-comp personalities like Housewives with Survivor players or more in-game evidence for Faithfuls to suspect Traitors, such as giving them a reason to sabotage competitions. But The Traitors has become a hit because it leans into what we already know and love about these people and the shows they come from, and there’s no real reason to mess with what has worked so well. It pulls from the backstabbing of Survivor, the alliance-building of Big Brother, the charm offensive of players from shows like The Bachelor, and even the character-building so essential to the Housewives franchise. It turned out that the way to create the first reality-competition smash of the streaming era wasn’t just to repeat one thing that worked before but to take pieces from a bunch of shows to create a Frankenstein’s monster of the genre. And it truly is alive.
