The Traitors (UK version, season two)

In case you’ve missed The Traitors (and I didn’t watch season 1, there are other versions around the world, this is about the UK version) the essential format is a game of Werewolf, Blink Murder, or Among Us - there’s a bunch of traitors who try to murder the others, the faithful, while the faithful try to work out who the traitors are. There is a big cash prize, all the players have to work together to win build the prize pot up. If any traitors are left standing, they take it all home, otherwise it’s shared among the faithful. Apparently in Season 1 of the UK show the faithful won, in all the previously aired shows across the UK, Australia and the US, this is the only time this has happened. What makes this a bit different, apart from the chance to win a chunk of up to £120,000 (they actually played for £95,150 in the end), is that the players go to a nice remote bit of Scotland and live and play together for a up to a fortnight. It’s not playing with your friends, several rounds in an hour, this is one round per day, and you get all these people - mostly strangers - pushed together trying to work out who are the traitors and who are the faithful. Watching from the outside I have some opinions. First, like all these sorts of games, the thoughts about who is a traitor (werewolf or whoever) and the arguments used are frequently insane. Person X changed their vote, so they must be a traitor… pardon? They had an idea before hand and they were swayed by arguments they heard so they changed their mind isn’t a possibility, it’s clearly the actions of a traitor? “I have genuine evidence…” is a phrase that I came to hate, because they had a word or phrase taken out of context, and then used that to support their existing suspicions. Of course it’s easy when I’m watching and know they’re talking bollocks, but still. These people are massively swayed by personality and not clear thought. I’m not saying I’d do any better, but jeez, they’re bad. When you play with friends and you play fast, these festering, lingering suspicions and “Oh, but X said Y three days ago, so that’s evidence…” don’t build up, at least not in my experience of playing these types of games. Does it make for good drama? Sometimes, the very final choice really was dramatic, but often it’s more like a bunch of children squabbling and there’s just enough fun that I kept watching. Equally, the show is set up to create good TV, and thus to create cliff-hangers that invite you back for the next show. Often they’re really good which means when they flop - and they have had bad ones - they really fall hard. Watching the players, especially the traitors, laying out their tactics is fun. Thinking about the reads they have on the players compared to the reads I get - that we are given - this is a big part of what me keep coming back. I don’t know whether I’ll watch Season 3 - and I’m sure there will be one - the format is broken. The TV show format needs to have jeopardy and at least one traitor reaching the final episode. If you play at home and you get all the werewolves, that’s it, game over. But if you play the TV version, they have to have traitors to keep the tension high. And while everyone knows that’s the rules, it just alters the game enough to suit TV that it distorts the game and makes it not quite work. The money factor also feels odd to me: especially towards the end, players made decisions about the money rather than the traitors. I realise that’s part of why they’re there, but it feels like another distortion of the game, and just pulls me out of it. As I was watching, I was invested in patches: I didn’t like certain characters and I was happy to see them go, I did like others and I was sorry to see them go. Other parts I thought were meh - ok, the first murder is always going to be like that because you don’t know one face out of 22 - but the too many landed that way for me. The challenges were kind of fun in places but, again, watching a random selection of people do, in essence, fancy team building challenges is not something that really maintains my interest over a dozen episodes. A few were more interesting than that, where they ramped up the campness, or the psychological components, but “can you all drag the components of a trebuchet to a given point, then assemble and fire it?” One of those is fun (that one, in fact) but it gets dull after a while. I can see why it works, but and I was hooked enough to watch it all. But there are enough bits that I didn’t love I won’t be coming back. I’m not applying the tests to this - it didn’t have characters, it’s not scripted so it’s null for all of them.