The Deviously Addictive Reality Show That’s Taking the World by Storm

A roomful of people is split at random into two groups. Those parties stand out in my mind for their hallucinogenic intensity, which irreversibly exposed the unreliability of character judgment and the thin membrane between truth and lies—including deceiving oneself, the most reliable method for a “traitor,” in the TV show’s argot, to mimic an innocent “faithful.” One could also learn these lessons from, say, marriage or parenthood or drug addiction. In the past month, I’ve devoured four international iterations: the U.K., U.S., and Australian versions as well as the original 2021 Dutch version, De Verraders, which I dug up online with fan-made subtitles. It’s the warm, fuzzy Great British Bake Off of backstabbing game series, which sets it up well as reality TV for people who don’t usually like reality TV. Obviously a bid to draw in already committed fans, it saddles The Traitors with myriad insider backstories that make the show far less transparent to all the reality TV skeptics who got hooked in the U.K. It’s not that the reality “celebrities,” as they call themselves, are bad competitors; one, Kate from Below Deck, even makes up for it by functioning as a kind of Andy Kaufman–esque comic saboteur.