The Traitors - BBC (& other networks in other countries) reality gameshow

Everyone agrees that this is the best thing of its type on TV, so let's give it a thread.

https://i.imgur.com/WglAP1Y.png

(even if just as a safe place to say that parliamentary advisors must be eliminated on principle, and this one in particular does not seem to be an exception)

psyched for this, season 1 was great

just hope they haven't brought in a load of "characters" and oddballs this time to "liven it up" like BB did. S1 was great partly because the folks in it were so normal.

Halfway through the first episode (first three are now up on iplayer) and seems like a reasonable mix of people - only big difference from S1 is that they all have arrived with gameplans, but that's unavoidable I guess.

Having said that and having finished episode one now, I do kind of hate two of the traitors. One of them in particular.

Kind of hard to see how this thread is gonna pan out though. Obviously I want to avoid spoilers but if the thread is a spoiler-free zone then I don't really see that there's much else to discuss. Ofc we could use spoiler tags but I don't trust myself not to click on them lol. I'll probably end up avoiding the thread altogether tbh. Great show though and I've lined up the first three episodes for watching.

Just finished ep 3. Is it reverting to one per week after this week? At which point surely the episodes are fair game for discussion after airing on BBC 1 and anyone wanting to avoid spoilers can stay off the thread until they've watched?

I was late to the party first time round and binged the entire thing in about three days - waiting for new episodes is torture

think maybe the best way would be to consider episodes "already spoiled" as soon as they air?

or as soon as they are on iplayer, which means I have 1.5 to catch up on.

Not as soon as they're on iPlayer, please. We don't have iPlayer in Ireland, and I want to chat with fellow Traitor enthusiasts.

Is it my imagination or do the contestants seem a little bit more telegenic this time round? One of the things I really enjoyed about the first UK series was how they were all different shapes and sizes and abilities. People seem a bit fitter and a bit more generic-reality-contestant this time? It could just be my imagination, though. I have only seen one episode.

Someone said something on social media the other day along the lines of "watch all us gays go all in on someone without checking their social media first" and I wondered what that might reference.

Broadcast plan is to stick to Weds/Thurs/Fri each week and have that weeks shows availability at 10pm on Wednesday. I broke and watched ep3 last night, but I'm not in at primetime on a Friday.

it's on TV tonight - so maybe safe to talk (with spoiler tags) from tomorrow?

watched the first three episodes - incredible ending to episode 3, cannot believe they would leave us for a week on that cliffhanger!

I have mellowed a lot to the contestants, still dislike two of the traitors though.

End of ep3 had me actually screaming at the telly, the utter bastards.

Ok, going with the spoilers now

Ash is just useless at being a traitor, she is lucky to have survived this far. If she isn't going out now then it's going to be an extremely awkward meeting (we're going to start an episode with a banishment THEN a kill aren't we?) but the clips showed them being fairly jolly so she may well be out? Paul has me concerned that the correct strategy for this game is to be a straight-up psychopath, the shock around the table when he received a single vote was the funniest moment so far. The mother/son twist is a good one, but I think there will be another secret ready to be revealed next week.

Agree with all of that. I think the next secret reveal is that Evie and Tracey are mother and daughter. There's been very little contact between them and very little focus on them - both are from Inverness (though Tracey's clearly not from there originally judging by her accent) but that hasn't come up at all

Stacey Dooley made the point on the Ed Gamble podcast show - which isn't really worth your time if you were wondering - that accent is a much bigger signifier that you would expect in picking these things out, that her and her mum never get identified as such because she's got a really strong Scouse accent so if true it could go unnoticed for a very long time.

I just thought with Evie and Miles chatting about both being vet nurses, she was quite inquisitive and would have sussed that Tracey and her were both from the same place. Likewise Tracey would surely have clocked the Inverness accent on a stranger...

I'm sure this is all above board and everything but I'm still intrigued by how they film it. They say everyone has their own "living quarters" but we never get to see them or what the layout of them is like. How do they film the bits with the traitors in the tower and the straight-to-camera interviews with them? How do the programme-makers manage to keep the filming of these parts secret from the faithfuls?

Guessing there is a diary room, like in Big Brother, and everyone has a turn to visit it each day.
I always wonder why they don't stay in the castle, but I guess they want to eliminate any chance of the contestants seeing each-other moving around, especially in the evening.

That was what I was wondering, because I assumed they do stay in the castle. Has it been shown that they don't?

Footage strongly suggests that they are taken away by jeep every night to somewhere else, and then brought back in the morning for filming.

Ivan and Rayan from last series are on Twitter and one of them said that they stay in a different hotel. You do occasionally see living quarters, am sure last series there were shots of people in showers and in their beds.

It's the Marriott at Inverness Airport, Alan Cumming said it in an interview.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/obsessed/alan-cumming-enters-his-bond-villain-era-as-host-of-the-traitors

Anyway I'm assuming they employ some kind of Circle type lockdown in the hotel, all brought in individually and all doors shut while people are moving.

If room occupants are anonymised then you can't tell who's walking past your room, but you would expect some people to be (Traitors, victims) so footsteps wouldn't be weird. I assume victims are alerted through some kind of pager in their room.

I haven't watched the American one, didn't realise it was filmed here too, but that'll explain why my mum saw Alan Cumming wandering around the town one day.

I assume they all do some generic location shots of sleeping and getting up and stuff at a fancier location (maybe even the castle) to be inserted into the show at some point.

I think the precedent was set by The Circle, because the American one is filmed in the same flats in Manchester.

I really enjoy the staged shots of them in their "room", combing their hair, reading a book, sitting on the bed etc.

I'm watching the second season having not seen the first (so reading this thread peeking through my fingers in case of spoilers). Brian's completely inexplicable meltdown* made for some excellent TV.

*said with the disclaimer that I'm sure I'd behave in a similarly inexplicable way

Spoilers for series 1 which Merdeyeux can read at his peril:

Brian's behaviour reminded me a bit of Aaron's complete overreaction in S1 but that actually provided some humanity and redemption for him in the end

Nice to see they abandoned the iPlayer format I posted above after the first week despite me typing it the day after the BBC guy had said it.

Anyway, I'm enjoying this year but it's leaning so hard into social media trends and likes that I'm finding the editing super weird - which is making me notice other things.

The funeral episode last night must have been an editing decision after week 1, right? There's no way they could have known Diane was going to be such a twitter sensation before the first episodes aired and I find it hard to believe they would have centred any other contestant that way. So was it re-edited last week?

The inserts this year have been crazy, last Thursday there was a 5 second shot of a topless Charlotte in a bath. Wtf? In week 1 there was a similar shot of Andrew in the shower. So someone in the production staff persuaded them to strip off on set in the big house for... why?

The strangest piece has been in the Ed Gamble show. There's a section where the two latest contestants out read the list of Traitors for reaction faces. They're then interviewed. So last night, in the interview section, they made a big play and talked to Diane about being a social media sensation and read out tweets. Which means it's new/current. But... they're wearing the same clothes in both those sections so either they've been told to and the reveal was during filming, or the surprise at the reveal is fake and they're relying on the acting skills of an entire show comprising members of the public to be convincing (which they seem to be managing). Either of which are baffling decisions and only needed if you're pretending the main show is being filmed live (which the weather makes a nonsense) or that none of the contestants talk to each other between filming and broadcast.

Think Paul will come a cropper tonight, pretty hard, and maybe set up for it by Harry, who I think will win.

took me until episode 5 or 6 to realise that Charlie and Evie are two different people.

My guess is they tell them to wear the same clothes, but I guess we will find out from podcasts when the whole thing is over, because God forbid any detail of a television show go unpodcasted.

I only say that because I remember a big article someone wrote about their experience on Masterchef in the US, and how they had to wear the same clothes (and not wash their hair!) for a week while they filmed their episode and all the reactions and retakes and stuff.

I suspect the production team knew the value of the central contestant in the funeral task - it might actually be that they had a couple of tasks up their sleeve and may have decided not to waste the funeral task had it fallen on a weaker or duller player (and it's their editing pushing strong player narrative anyway to a certain extent).

The companion show is already a "visualised podcast" with additional podcast available from the same recording so pop is very firmly eating itself there.

What I can't work out is why the pretence it's the same time unless it is because surely everyone alive knows shooting and screening are months apart and all the contestants meet up after shooting is done - gbbo even makes a virtue of it FFS with the 'after filming' roadtrip montage after the final.

It would have been impossible not to have done the funeral task otherwise because it was all based on the slow death so they can't have switched it round; my assumption is that for someone less giffable they would kind of race through it and have extended the round table. Which brings us back to 'current' editing.

Well, no, they could just have delivered the murder letter and made it a regular murder and come up with another ruse to use the cemetery area at a later date, no?

(Am not watching tonight's live as my other half has had the audacity to make other plans)

No spoilers on tonight's, but what a great show.

I see what you mean about the funeral but it kind of needed the volume of contestants to make it a thing. If their remaining missions are divide and dissolve like tonight's then they're completely biased for late tasks so not sure when it could have swapped in.

surely everyone alive knows shooting and screening are months apart

I guess if you sat people down and said it to them, they would agree that they know it, but people are willing to suspend disbelief when the programme helps them to. I mean, realistically we all know the Hootenany isn't live, but you allow yourself to forget when you're watching it. It feels like they've opted for a more Big Brother-y feeling to make it more of an appointment show, to make people forget they're not watching a live show. But I agree that it isn't always coming across very clearly - it seems a bit muddled.

For me, it just feels a bit more forced this year, and not in particularly clever ways. Look into each others' eyes and say "I am a faithful,"? Not very subtle or imaginative as a way of ferreting out suspects, is it?

it's one of my least favourite bits, but they did exactly the same last year

It was spectacularly bad though, because all the Faithful said it normally, and all the Traitors overemphasised the 'AM' so they sounded like Sean Connery introducing himself in Highlander.

Lol. They did! Yeah, they are not playing it cool at all.

Some brave knitwear choices from Claude this evening.

Hi Uncloaked editors! Charlie and Charlotte wearing different clothes in the two segments last night.

Not sure Ross' strategy is going to work. Harry still playing a blinder.

Interesting nugget over the weekend that the British and American versions are basically shot concurrently so they don't need to break the sets up - so the funeral, say, was filmed one day for the Brits and the next day for the US. Makes it a fascinating set of logistics and arguably makes the airport hotel easier to manage if you don't know whether it's someone from your show or the other one next to you.

Have people been following the breakfast thing? Basically, it seems that in series 1 the traitors always had a shortlist of two or three faithfuls they were thinking of murdering each night. For the sake of building tension for the viewing public, these two or three were always the last to come down for breakfast in the morning (minus the one who was murdered, of course). The thinking goes that an astute faithful would have been able to work out that the last one down to breakfast in the morning would always be a faithful. It's a bit of a stretch to me, but it seems significant enough that the programme-makers have changed it up this time.

"Jasmine is getting really emotional." Yes, Zack, because you are extremely annoying and she is trying not to murder you for real.

I KNEW Ross was going to completely fumble his revenge

xp It's a stupid cliffhanger to leave us with and 6 days to wait until it's resolved.

But in the absence of any evidence, it's usually an early theory to assume that the clever ones are the traitors and that cleverness is usually by reading a book or being a journalist or being a public intellectual. They never take street smarts into account, or remember that half the comedians in there are well-educated as well. Olusoga's general rubbishness should have put paid to that, but they're all "oh Amol had to go, he's so smart".

My cynical take on this is that they're all luvvies invested in praising people for whatever their brand is - so if the brand is booksmart they'll focus on that. Someone did call James Acaster highly intelligent but that may have been a regular traitor on the recap show.

I'll admit though that I also felt defensive towards Olusoga, who makes pretty much the only history programmes on TV currently worth watching and has his intellectual credentials questioned at every turn. Certainly a more convincing public intellectual than Stephen Fry!

Mobile browser. I always forget zing exists

xp It's a stupid cliffhanger to leave us with and 6 days to wait until it's resolved.

I can only think that they had no choice but to cut the episode there, because every single person voted REG, probably including REG himself.

Ooh look, I’ve found a bug! Mobile browser indeed.

They always cut at the cliffhanger iirc, with the reward being you've also gotten the cliffhanger from last ep (in this case, who the Traitors decided to kill); Limmy didn't watch episode one so that's why he doesn't address that.

It is what it is, not particularly uncommon for television. Particularly annoying tho if you're binging and don't feel like another episode, but do feel the need to find out what happened.

I'll admit though that I also felt defensive towards Olusoga, who makes pretty much the only history programmes on TV currently worth watching and has his intellectual credentials questioned at every turn. Certainly a more convincing public intellectual than Stephen Fry!

It's class and race differences in a nutshell, isn't it? There are a lot of reasons why Stephen Fry appears to speak with more authority than David Olusoga. It's like whenever you watch Celebrity Masterchef and one of the men from Made in Chelsea is on it. They immediately take charge of any group task, and everyone else just lets them. I'm not even saying they're terrible at it, but it's interesting to watch it happen.

in fairness, Fry was crap but he went out pretty early. Olusoga remained crap right to the end

I think with the Celeb version they want to delay getting rid of anyone, that's why at the end of the first week we are only down one person. But I really wish they would have the guts to not do that.

I suppose they've paid a lot of money for Richard E Grant. They want to get some value out of it.

The best value for REG would be max earnings, min time spent in the castle, of course.

They've ended a few shows at the same point several times over the various series

I guess it does tend to suggest it was a landslide against REG as otherwise you suspect they would have shown the voting and then ended just before the deciding vote or something

Am I a bit dim in thinking only the two women from the task are up for being picked and not Withnail?

That's the murder not the banishment.

If its a Grant/Fry goodbye tomorrow we've lost major goodie & baddie energy in the house and not sure the others will be able to up their game enough to make it what is could have been.

yep, the game strategies are so well established now that the real entertainment value comes from agents of chaos, it'll be sad to lose REG

I keep expecting the comedians to behave as if it’s Last One Laughing. Why are they not being funny 100% of the time? Bah. Still, I have high hopes for Lycett. Jerry Hall, much as I can’t stand her, is entertainingly bonkers.

James Acaster being a traitor agaibst his own will has shakespearean potential imo.

I actually think he'll really struggle

yeah he look absolutely terrified at the round table

I’m being served ads for Hannah Fry’s theatre tour EVERYWHERE right now. And I remember similar carpet bombing of Cat Burns album ads during her last few days in the castle last year, so this current campaign being so full-on actually feels like a spoiler (although hopefully I’m misreading it).

Yeah, I agree about James Acaster - he is definitely lacking the naughty delight which Alan Carr developed after his initial reluctance.

That's why it's good! Romantic antihero forced to kill against his better nature is a great new twist for the show.

Ha, I agree with that too!

Apparently James Acaster is attracting lots of new erotic interest from viewers. So I was pleased when someone at work said that if I was on it, I'd be a bit of a James Acaster

Favourite Acaster quote from today "It's like the Sugababes"

Last year they showed Tom Daley in the shower right before he was bumped off. So my bet is on Blunt to get murdered next.

Favourite Acaster quote from today "It's like the Sugababes"

^ Also this

It's those wee moments - Romesh correcting Joanne on her misuse of "complicitly" was also great.

Blunt's shower scene was clearly taking the piss out of Tom Daley. I'm very much enjoying him being a squeaky-voiced balladeer and yet out-alpha-male-ing Ross Kemp at every tasks.

I was talking about this on another thread, and here it is again: Miranda can't believe that everyone - including herself! - got talked into doing something they didn't want to do because posh ex-army white man James Blunt told them to. People can't help themselves.

Oh no, wait, I mentioned it on this thread. I maybe watch too much television.

Never!

That was one of the best ends to an episode of traitors yet. The supercut of faces had me in stitches.

Guess it could have been edited but it did look very suspicious with them both constantly yawning and looked like the already paranoid Ross may have twigged something was afoot, so they could definitely be in trouble if it's Jerry who yawned

Maya may be a good liar but she's a terrible yawner.

Not sure why but I'm still not really feeling this series.

I'm not enjoying it as much.

I like it!
yawning task was dumb but lol.

Also risky behaviour because somehow everyone seems to cotton onto traitors being more tired because of extra turret filming, so the pair of them yawning away is surely playing right into that, and how are they going to get away with "am I boring you?" if someone does crack?

The fatal flaw of the show is that smart and interesting people tend not to last very long. Also it's maddening that they took Richard's "I'm a traitor" thing so seriously and dismissed Joanne saying she'd been at the crypt murder as Joanne just being Joanne. Then brought it back up and forgot it again as soon as Joe also said something dumb.

I think it’s kind of clever for the show runners to come up with yawning as a murder weapon because it does add that extra layer of difficulty as you say. Aha! You’re tired! Though they got past Leigh-Anne’s lipgloss so perhaps it will be easier to get away with than I’m imagining.

What happens if nobody yawns? Failure = no murder and suspicion of another recruitment? That might not be the worst thing for the traitors to be honest, especially if nobody clocks their weird behaviour.

yeah, I did wonder if the focus on Leigh-Anne approaching Miranda with 'do you want to dance' could be framed as a murder attempt. although probably loads of this stuff happens all the time and they don't show it.

Joanne's explanation for 'yes it was horrible' sounded so dodgy it almost convinced me she was a traitor! not the simple 'oh yes it was horrible... for Claudia to make you do that' or 'it sounded horrible'. weird.

I find it weird that nobody can ever remember their own words accurately. I know that's just an effect of the editing - they say six million things in a day and we only see the important statements - but it's still weird when they can't remember what they said at the round table the day before.

dismissed Joanne saying she'd been at the crypt murder as Joanne just being Joanne.

But she didn't say she was there. She said it was horrible, but then immediately said "I wasn't there!" whereas it took Richard a minute to realise he had fucked up.
I have no time for Joanne, but I warmed to her when she said she just couldn't write Hannah's name down because even if it's a game, it's hard to be part of a pile-on, partly because I had just said the exact same thing at home.

I've no time for her as a comedian, I should stress. I have no idea what she's like as a person.

I find it weird that nobody can ever remember their own words accurately. I know that's just an effect of the editing - they say six million things in a day and we only see the important statements - but it's still weird when they can't remember what they said at the round table the day before.

A few of them are likely sloshed on free booze

Oh yes, good point.

It is also a nice illustration of how unreliable humans and their memories are.

They're only allowed two alcoholic drinks a night apparently

after binging the UK seasons earlier this year, I am getting back into Traitors by watching the new US season and also going back to watch the US seasons I haven’t seen. can't read this thread, tho, bc I assume it is mostly discussion of the new UK celeb season, which won't be on Peacock until it's over. kind of wondering whether we need a separate thread for the US version, so I can avoid UK spoilers, but then I don't know if anyone besides me is even watching it.

Also it's maddening that they took Richard's "I'm a traitor" thing so seriously and dismissed Joanne saying she'd been at the crypt murder as Joanne just being Joanne.

Well sure but they were right! I suppose the rationale could be "she's the only one who thought Richard was just funning, so maybe that's how things work in her world".

It's pretty funny that useless Jerry keeps suggesting James Acaster might be a traitor but because it's her no one entertains it, it's like that trope where there's a character everyone says is just mad but actually they have been driven so by secret knowledge.

it's funny watching US and UK at the same time, they reuse the challenges. the UK celebs took the death parade in stride much better than the regular folk Americans.