So,
Traitors.
My entire household has had COVID this last week, so I have started watching Traitors UK. (OMG illness is so much worse when it’s three people including a baby instead of just me. Now I get to feel guilty when I need to just lie down in addition to feeling crummy since my wife also feels crummy and somebody has to care for the baby who feels crummy.)
Traitors started in the UK and was adapted for the US. (There are also Australian and New Zealand versions I haven’t watched. Yet.) I’ve now watched the first season of Traitors UK and started the second. It’s filmed in the same castle and has (almost) the same challenges as US. But it’s a very different show.
- The host in the UK is Claudia Winkleman. If you’ve watched any British panel shows, you’ve seen Claudia Winkleman. She’s a television presenter and has hosted Strictly Come Dancing for the last decade and a half. She also makes appearances on everything else—Would I Lie to You, Big Fat Quiz of the Year, Taskmaster. Alan Cumming as host is camping it up all over everything. Claudia Winkleman is arguably a kind of camp figure—she’s got that eyeliner and those bangs and on the panel shows she’s not so much making jokes as being a joke—but she’s presenting with deadly sincerity. The whole vibe is: “It’s not me you’ve let down—it’s yourselves.”
- The UK version is all regular people, as opposed to US which was half regular joes half reality stars first season and all reality stars second season.
- Some of the challenges are different. The UK version had a sheep herding challenge. Can’t imagine why they didn’t do that in the US version.
The difference in tone is there from the start. In the first episode of Traitors UK (spoiler), the first thing Winkleman does is ask everyone to line themselves up from most likely to win to least likely to win. Two guys being chivalrous put themselves at the bottom. She then says to them, since you don’t think you can win, I’ll take you at your word. You can leave. This immediately puts an enormous pall over all the other players. This is a game you can fuck up without even realizing the stakes.
Having it be all regular people also makes it very different in feel. I was talking about reality show genres in the last post, but regardless of genre, people who’ve been on reality shows before have some understanding of what the stresses of shooting a reality show are and how they handle themselves under pressure. Not at all so for the regular people. The regular people start coming apart at the seams. There’s a panic attack. There are screaming matches.
( Spoiler for Traitors UK season 1 ) Worth it to point out that all the contestants in Traitors UK season 1 have publicly said they’re friends after the show. They have a group chat. (Except for one player who physically assaulted a waiter (after the show). No one talks to him.) Watching the show, you would not think that.
There’s also the fact that there’s an element of economic coercion when you’re talking about regular people. Yes, reality stars also want the money and also have a reason to have it, but they’re in the entertainment business first and foremost. For these contestants, the reason they are participating is often because they have no other way to get enough money to pay for their wedding, or their retirement, or in one case, to pay for a prosthetic arm. (I expect this reason in the US. NHS—do better.) Which of course makes the whole genre feel worse.
(As a total aside, I’ve noticed that British TV is way way more likely to foreground people with disabilities. Both seasons of Traitors UK have multiple contestants with visible disabilities. It’s not just this show, though. One of the comedians that makes the rounds of panel shows and is on the current season of Taskmaster is Rosie Jones, who has cerebral palsy. She is hilarious, and her comedy is neither all about her disability or portrayed with the “inspiring story” framing she’d get in the US. I honestly can’t think of anyone like Rosie Jones that’s successful on that level in the US.)
One of my takeaways is—no one can tell when other people are lying. The more certain they are that they can read people, the more wrong they are. And there are people whose jobs are reading people, who’ve joined the show because they have confidence in their abilities. A magician who does cold reads. A member of law enforcement. A retired schoolteacher. Someone who is hard of hearing who says that’s given her a lot of experience reading body language.
All of them all of them completely crap at identifying liars.
This is a show where there is an objective truth that the viewers know. There are traitors, they are lying, you can watch them lie. But what people are identifying as indicators of lying are vibes. Exhibitions of stress (which—they’re all stressed, not just the traitors). Any kind of difference at all. The previously mentioned black trans woman incident. But any difference. Extroverts point out the introverts. Introverts point out the extroverts. People handling the stress badly point to people handling it well. People handling it well point to people handling it badly. And the biggest “indicator”—I just don’t like that person.
People start positing their theories of how you can tell: Someone has to be accused at the roundtable, then you can tell by how they react whether they’re telling the truth. One person said, well, I’m a faithful, and I know how I reacted, so I know if you didn’t react like that, you’re not a faithful. And—no! People react to stress differently! Some people fight back, some people cry, some people panic, some people shut down.
Really, this is an excellent demonstration of why confessions to the police are completely unreliable.
Ultimately, people decide who must be faithful based on who they like the most. And maybe in the real world, there’s reason to believe your friends wouldn’t betray you because they’re good people. But this is a game where the structure requires certain people to play as traitors. That doesn’t make them bad or shady people. That makes them game players. So I don’t know why people would expect the friends they’ve made in the game to be loyal to them when their role as traitor was chosen before they became friends. But every season, they do.
When I first started watching, I thought the physical challenges were wastes of time—I didn’t understand the point. They’re ostensibly to build the prize pot for the end of the game, but when you’ve split the people up into teams, they’re not competing for anything (until the shield mechanic in season 2). After watching a few seasons, the physical challenges are essential to the game functioning. I watched a BBC interview with the final five of season 1 of Traitors UK in which Claudia Winkleman says that the physical challenges are there as a mental health break. To get them out of the castle and doing something other than be paranoid at each other all day. It’s that, but it’s also trauma bonding. In the front half of the season, people often get targeted for elimination for not being team players. Usually by the end of the season, the challenges are people all working as one team, cheering each other on. It’s emotional whiplash, to go from one team, one goal, to voting each other off the show.
In season one of Traitors UK, there’s a moment in one of the final episodes where everyone is in the same room, talking about how much they hate the traitors and how much they want to make sure a traitor doesn’t get the money. And someone goes—you know what’s funny? We talk about them as if they aren’t here. But they are.
Much more in the UK seasons than in the US, there’s this identification of all the stress and difficulty everyone is going through with the traitors as the cause—I can’t have suffered all this for a traitor to win. Which means that when they’re sure someone’s a traitor, it justifies any rhetoric against them. And of course, over and over, as stated above, people are incredibly wrong about who the traitors are.
What keeps me coming back is that the game is so unpredictable. Even with the same format and same challenges, every season has played out completely differently because whether a strategy works or not depends entirely on the other players. The final fire has been a total shocker every season I’ve watched, not just in terms of what happened but in how everyone felt about it.
I expect I’ll have more thoughts as I inevitably watch the Australian and NZ versions.
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