This essay was originally posted on Substack in March 2023.
I’m obsessed with The Traitors. It’s a reality TV show based on the psychological party game Werewolf, in which a minority of contestants (the “Traitors”) secretly conspire to eliminate all other contestants (the “Faithful”) without being caught. From wink murder to Among Us, many variants have been played over the decades, but it’s a game that makes for much better television. I became an instant fan of the UK show before hunting down the US and Australian versions, as well as the original Dutch.
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| The roundtable in the first UK season of The Traitors |
The premise is deceptively simple: a bunch of strangers hang out in a castle, collectively deciding who to banish in a roundtable vote at the end of each day. Later that night, no more than 3 of these strangers—the titular Traitors—secretly convene to choose their next “murder victim,” who must also leave the game (their fate is only revealed at breakfast the next day). At stake is a six-figure cash prize, which will either be shared by the last remaining Faithful, or stolen by any Traitors who manage to lie and deceive their way to the finale. The game gets deeper and more emotional over time as relationships blossom, and it’s genuinely thrilling to watch a wacky conspiracy theory gain momentum among the Faithful (“She didn’t raise her glass for a toast!”), or see a Traitor stab their fellow Traitor in the back for the first time.
But what’s truly special about Traitors is that, unlike most reality TV, the game continues with or without an audience watching. Contestants aren’t filmed 24/7 in isolation from the real world (like in most gradual elimination shows), yet they stay in their role once the cameras have been turned off and producers have gone to bed. The whole crew must also play along in earnest throughout, lest they reveal a key piece of information or otherwise influence gameplay. For a game that’s sustained over several weeks, we see surprisingly little of it. As a viewer, the mystery of what happens off-screen fascinates me just as much as what does.
We have few clues about what the day-to-day production of The Traitors is like. We know the basic rules of the game, including that Traitors cannot explicitly reveal their identity or that of their peers (“explicitly” being the key word, as UK fans have learned). We know that, despite the campy scenes filmed in each murder victim’s bedroom, contestants don’t actually sleep in the Ardross Castle (instead staying at a much less glamorous Inverness airport hotel). We assume that the editing is honest, because producers don’t need to construct narratives or fabricate drama: that’s precisely what the cast is doing, simply by playing the game. Everything else about the show, however, is a well-kept secret.
When do the Traitors don their capes and lanterns, and how are their meetings filmed without the Faithful knowing? What conversations happen behind closed doors? How has this or that person’s behavior changed, like everyone claims? The nightly roundtables—in which participants share their suspicions and accuse each other of being Traitors—last for hours, yet we only see 15 or 20 minutes of that discussion in any given episode. Maddy suspected Wilf partly because his snack of choice was Peperami, which is amazing, but you can only find that out by digging through search results online. UK Traitor Alyssa’s biggest blunder was never caught on film. The final cut of The Traitors is highly selective and deliberately sparse, which is exactly what makes it so compelling: it allows us to imagine the rest of the story.
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| Barbara Sloesen in the first season of De Verraders |
In traditional game design, stories that arise through play are described as “emergent,” because they emerge from the interaction between a player and a game’s mechanics. Emergence is typical of tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons, which provide little context but support a wide variety of interpretations. Players take what the game gives them, and use their imagination to fill in the gaps. For the Traitors cast, this means gathering whatever information they can find to build their case. For the audience, this means writing the missing beats between a roundtable and breakfast, or guessing what a player’s strategy might be. My interpretation of why Aisha was murdered might not be the same as yours, and that’s exciting!
I’m happy not knowing everything that happens during the filming of The Traitors, and not just because of emergence; it’s a refreshingly sane approach to reality TV. The catch-22 of reality entertainment is that the best stories often come at the expense of participants’ mental health. As video essayist Broey Deschanel points out, Love Island—a program notorious for its on-camera sex and off-camera suicides—lost its spark over time as its content was sanitized and conditions in the villa improved. Reality TV stars are expected to give up their privacy, their image rights, even their mobile phones, and are filmed around the clock despite not receiving the basic protections of a 9-to-5 employee. If a little more humanity can be afforded to the Traitors cast—who are already engaged in psychological warfare with each other—without sacrificing the quality of the show itself, that’s a lead that should be doggedly pursued.
The ethics of The Traitors are still questionable; the gameplay is emotionally gruelling. Banishments can be traumatic, leading to tears and sometimes panic attacks among the accused. The cash prize holds a different meaning for each contestant, bringing a sense of gravity to what could otherwise be a light-hearted show. In the US Traitors, economic disparity is the elephant in the room, as nurses and hairdressers and DMV managers compete against a former Real Housewife of Beverly Hills. Australia’s finale is a gutpunch, which may be why producers chose to highlight the victor’s motives, while the loser’s own medical bills didn’t make the final cut (they have since set up a GoFundMe). Though it might look angelic next to other reality shows, The Traitors cannot escape the moral conundrum posed by the genre.
The Traitors doesn’t solve all of reality TV’s problems, but in proving it can captivate us with what it decides not to show, it may just be onto something groundbreaking.
