One More Go

The Traitors, first broadcast last year on BBC, was a bit of a gateway drug for me when it came to reality TV. I caught an episode part way through its initial run and found it so intriguing that I went to back to watch the entire thing. After watching that first season I also watched the American run, and have been devouring TV shows like The Mole and The Devil’s Plan since. With the second season of The Traitors on the horizon, I’ve been reflecting a little on the show and thinking up some suggestions on how the producers could add a little more drama to the upcoming series.

The main premise of the show is that there are three contestants (out of twenty two) who are designated the traitors, their main goal is to make it to the end. The remaining contestants are the faithful, and for them to win, they must eliminate all of the traitors before the end of the game. Each night offers the traitors an opportunity to secretly eliminate someone from the game, then, the following morning everyone takes part in a task to increase the collective prize money, before the day ends with an open vote to eliminate somebody else from the game. It’s basically a series long game of Werewolf, with each round spread across an entire day. Unlike the American and Australian iterations of the show, the contestants in the UK are all regular people, and so the cash prize is a significant sum for everyone competing, adding extra edge to the scenes where the traitors are working hard to deprive the wider group of that shared sum. What makes the show so compelling, at least for me, is that the game is something I’ve played, kind of. It exists already in various forms, Werewolf, Coup, Two Rooms and a Boom, there are a tonne of interesting board games focussed around social deduction, and if you’ve ever played one, you know how it feels trying to keep a secret from the rest of the playing group as their suspicions are pointed directly at you. It’s exhilarating, but it’s also hard, and it’s exhausting. Watching the players dodge crisis after crisis is enthralling, but it’s made all the more impressive when I compare it to my own record in these game where everything usually falls apart so quickly.

As the second season approaches, I hope they expand the show beyond the core game, taking inspiration from other reality game shows such as The Devil’s Plan or its predecessor The Genius. In those shows, there is a new game every day that will require different strengths to win. Some may be social deduction, but there are also logical reasoning, memory tests, and math based games that allow different players to shine in each. Contestants who perform poorly are sent to an in game prison, while those who run out of chips, the in-game currency, are eliminated. There’re also some meta elements to the game, with secrets to discover on the chips themselves, and in the show’s various locations.

I would love to see The Traitors absorb some of these ideas for a second season, particularly in the structure of its daily tasks. As it stands, the tasks don’t feed back into the core game, and so they end up feeling a bit superfluous. If they emulated some of the games from The Devil’s Plan, it would give everyone an opportunity to show their strengths and weaknesses, providing players with more data that can be used to manipulate those around them. I’d also like to see them go further, swapping the rewards from an increased prize pool to secret information. In social deduction games, knowledge is power, and what better way to celebrate that than by giving the top performing players more information for them to weaponise. If the traitors have more to gain by denying a faithful from earning secrets, they’ll want to win, but they may look suspicious by winning every task, so it adds something new for them to balance and consider as they fight through each round.

Another element that feels a bit wasted is the show’s location. Set in a castle in the Scottish highlands, the only real location is the grand debate room where players try to evade suspicions, none of the other rooms are used to any great effect. Why not have secrets hidden, or actions that players must complete in various rooms across the castle? Rather than the traitors selecting their victim in a secret committee, what if instead they had to hide notes for one another, or the names of their victims in different locations? Adding a physical risk to the traitor’s schemes, and giving vigilant faithfuls an opportunity to discover their identities. It could also be used as a means of planting false information, and sowing suspicion between allies.

The Traitors was a massive success last year, capturing the imagination of viewers with its core loop and the characters who emerged on the show. While I think it would probably be fine if their second season was just more of the same with a new cast of personalities, I think it would be a huge shame not to push the concept a little further and add some extra mechanics and drama to the show. With teasers popping up across the BBC, whatever they end up doing, I don’t think we’ll have to wait too much longer before we find out.