The Traitors

When the concept is the strongest asset as well as the biggest liability. Twenty contestants, including three or four traitors playing against them, the traitors get to take out whoever they want, and the innocent ones get to take out one of the contestants they believe is a traitor, that is an awesome concept. The problem is that it's not polished and well thought out... First of all, the classic "Survival" team competitions for money are devoid of ideas and tension, are in no way connected to the "traitor/loyal among us" concept, and feel like camp competitions. The one thing that makes it interesting is the quality and skills of the traitors, they solely make the game, the others dance to their tune. Unless they're dullards (which they mostly aren't), they adopt a strategy of "we'll save the murders for capable opponents who would have the ability to expose us" and let the "less capable" ones promote themselves through a mixture of paranoia, Kafkaesque accusations, feelings, alliances and emotions. It comes to this, then, that the most interesting passage is the middle of the series, when a few capable players are still in the game, and it's a joy to see what approach and strategy the traitors choose to survive. If they succeed, it's basically anticlimactic until the finale, when it's a case of seeing if luck happens to smile on the morons too. In fact, it may come to a situation where those who pulled it off get nothing and the win falls, without any reward, into the hands of the cannon folder whose only asset was that they were incompetent, gullible, easily influenced, and basically sticky fish with no assets and that's why they lasted so long. I fully understand why this particular reality show has raised such a furore, why one national variation after another is being produced, why it's a hit everywhere, and that those who don't get a license for it are producing their own variations of the same thing. And inevitably, one of them will be better because it will pick up on those shortcomings. After all, if only they had combined this with The Mole, it would have been an absolute blast. | S1: 4/5 | S2: 4/5 | (12.04.2024)