The Traitors shows how people who are liked can get away with ‘murder’

The first, the ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office, shed new light on the ongoing systematic abuse and persecution of hundreds of postmasters. The second is the UK version of The Traitors, back after debuting last year when it was a surprise hit.

While The Traitors is unlikely to compete with Mr Bates in causing seismic waves politically, it is giving new life to that most tired of formats: reality TV. In so doing it is creating ripples numerous breakout moments and discussions, a heap of social media confabbing, and even a related online game.

Today’s reality TV has been getting more serious and financially important since Big Brother launched on Channel 4 in 2000, nearly a quarter of a century ago. At its outset that show was a brave exercise in broadcasting and social experimentation, but quickly collapsed into manipulation, voyeurism and treating participants as objects to be exploited and humiliated.

Big Brother’s UK origins were in a Dutch TV show bought by production company Endemol. It is little surprise then that The Traitors emerged from a Dutch series called De Verraders, which began in 2021, where the participants were celebrities of one kind or another.

As well as the UK version, there are others such as the US Traitors where the host is Alan Cummings in full tartanry, shot in the same place as the UK show, but with a host of reality TV stars – and strangely this year, the former speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow.

None of this sounds very auspicious but the UK Traitors works. Host Claudia Winkleman hams it up, includes pauses in her pronouncements to stress the power of her words to participants, has that famous fringe, and does it all with style and humanity.

READ MORE: The Traitors: Meet the series 2 Scottish contestants

She genuinely seems to care about the decisions of, and outcomes for, the group of folk who have come to act out a locked-door murder mystery for the entertainment of millions of viewers.

The setting is a beautiful Highland castle and its estate. Don’t be put off by the over-the-top sub-Harry-Potter-like feel to the interior decor; this remains a backdrop to the plotting and backstabbing which is the staple of the show and the fact that it both impresses and unnerves some of the competitors is also part of the story.

Twenty-two contestants (spoiler alert: some of them are discussed here) try to win a potential prize of up to £120,000. Divided into two groups, Traitors and Faithfuls – with the former chosen from the latter by Winkleman – the Faithfuls strive to win by preventing the Traitors from murdering them by identifying and banishing them from the game at the daily round table.

The Traitors, obviously unknown to the Faithfuls, have the power to murder one person every day. If any one of the Traitors gets to the final round, they win all the money.

The show’s daily group endurance activities to win monies to add to the prize pot are to this viewer the least appealing part of the programme and like the love child of The Krypton Factor and The Apprentice combined.

There is a wee twist though, in that a few shields are available for individuals to grab whilst taking part in team activities, which give a day’s immunity to being murdered by the Traitors. And sometimes of course these can fall into the wrong hands.

Every evening contestants gather around a roundtable and discuss who should be banished as a Traitor. In this all the Traitors have votes and with their identities secret try to divert attention away from themselves onto Faithfuls who get thrown under the bus by their then distraught teammates.

Following this, the Traitors convene at the top of the castle and discuss which Faithful they will murder that night. Relaying the news to their victim in a letter, the rest of the group only finds out the following morning when someone fails to appear for the group breakfast.

This adds a certain tension to the entire night, how people sleep, and the morning gathering.

READ MORE: The Traitors: When does season 2 start and who are the contestants?

Observing the agonising process by which the group identify and banish players, with the confused Faithfuls often backing the wrong horse while the Traitors lie through their teeth, is the fun and frustration of the programme.

The group are meant to be identifying and voting out the Traitors in their midst – but half-way through the current UK series, the roll call of who has been banished or murdered is eight Faithfuls to one Traitor.

The format asks big questions about how individuals behave in groups and how groups make decisions, both formal and informal. It brings up how we interact with strangers, how we form bonding relationships, who we trust and like, and who we don’t trust and dislike.

Faithfuls, banished by their peers (including Traitors), are often those perceived as having strong personalities, or sometimes conversely felt to be too quiet and not willing to discuss who they suspect of being Traitors.

Some folk are listened to such as Paul, one of the Traitors and nearly universally liked by the Faithfuls, who can shape group beliefs to the benefit of himself and the Traitors.

Ross, a Faithful, also often loudly moulds opinion, leading to the group incorrectly banishing Faithfuls – yet he seems to have some form of power that prevents people calling out his disastrous decisions.

However, some of the most thoughtful Faithfuls who try to bring up suspicions about players that the viewers know to be Traitors, are not listened to and then banished themselves, wrongly accused of being a Traitor. In this series, Sonja and Anthony have met this fate.

The collective often embodies an idiotic groupthink making them hunt as a pack and go after some stray, someone who has annoyed someone or been set up by a Traitor gaming the process.

Like a broken clock, the Faithful continually go in the wrong direction, then lament their idiocy and learn nothing. They spuriously use the most ridiculous logic to identify Traitors and then grimace as time after time they are shown to have gone down a dead end.

The rationales are perplexing and often boil down to someone justifying their wrong decision by the fact that someone once smiled at them at the start of the game but hasn’t recently, making them then obviously a Traitor.

No Faithful appears to have serious criteria for identifying the Traitors in their midst. Decisions are made on purely personal gut reactions, about liking someone or finding them friendly, rather than after having thought through on any strategic level how deceitful, lying people might behave to get their way.

People who are liked can thus get away with murder.

What is fascinating about The Traitors is that, shorn of its trappings, this is trashy TV uplifting our spirits at the start of the year but also much more. It tells us something about the human condition in 2024. Its many psychological layers – of individual backstories and personalities, of sub-groups and the entire group itself – could fill a charabanc of PhDs. It puts centre stage questions about how we see ourselves, who we identify with and why.

Watching the programme draws you to inevitably start questioning why the Faithful are losing the plot (and quite possibly the money). It draws you into the Machiavellian nature of the Traitors. Why is Paul so popular? Why is his mixture of people-pleasing and gaming people so successful? Will the secret mother-son Diane and Ross (“Diana Ross”) be revealed – and are there any other surprises?

In an age of tribes and divisions The Traitors poses playful observations about who is an insider and outsider; what are our common bonds; what divides us; how we choose our friends, enemies and frenemies; and how men and women act differently and try to exercise influence in different styles – all laced with the joys of lies and being two-faced.

I hope Paul gets his comeuppance but that is the joy of The Traitors. It has injected new energy into a cliched format while portraying in an imaginative way some of the big questions and dilemmas we face as individuals out of our depths, trying to make sense of the world.