This last Thursday, on March 26th, the season finale of the hit TV show, The Traitors, dropped on Peacock. The Traitors is a reality competition show that features multiple reality TV personalities from series such as Survivor, Big Brother and the Real Housewives franchises. Here, several contestants are chosen to be traitors, where every night, they must eliminate a player from the game and go undetected until the end. The rest of the cast, otherwise known as the faithful, must find out who the traitors in the game are and vote them out at the end of every episode.
The Traitors started airing weekly on the streaming service Peacock back in 2023. Since then, its popularity has only seemed to grow with each season and this was no different. With a plethora of contestants from the reality TV world, there is a good deal of drama to be delivered. Before the season’s premiere, there was already a lot of talk about the upcoming season as the contestants were announced. There were reality icons such as Lisa Rinna, big surprises with the mother of NFL stars Donna Kelce and controversial picks like The Bachelor star Colton Underwood and actor Michael Rappaport.
However, even with a cast full of big personalities, it seems the season has not reached the same heights as previous seasons. This season provided the first group of traitors, consisting of no players from shows like Big Brother or Survivor. Although our chosen traitors of Rob Rausch, Lisa Rinna and Candiace Dillard Bassett gave a lot of ruthless energy needed for their roles, with no one up in the turret protecting the gamer side of the reality tv spectrum, the strategy coming from the faithful’s was extremely lacking. Even though the boot order presented by the traitors was mostly smart, it mostly meant the loudest and most entertaining players were gone in the first batch of episodes.
The season quickly became one of the few things many reality competition shows never want to be: predictable. It soon became extremely clear that it wasn’t about whether the faithful or traitors would win. It was about how the traitors would win. Were there some slipups that occurred that brought more enticing moments for viewers, of course but they came too close to the end that at that point, it didn’t seem to have much importance.
However, as the season has now come to a close and many of its criticisms are being shared across its fans online, this gives the chance for the show to experiment and deliver an even better fifth season. The best aspect of The Traitors’ simple gameplay style is that it allows for a lot of variety for its cast and the twists shown throughout. With a fifth season already announced and a version of only regular US civilians underway, there are so many places the series’ future can go.
