The Befuddling New State of Play on ‘The Traitors UK’
Dust off your cloak: Traitors UK is back, warming our dry January cockles. The civilian edition barrels onto screens hot on the heels of the worst traitor of all time, Alan Carr, winning the celebrity death match in December, and sees a myriad of “you’d make a great traitor, actually,” contestants vying to sniff out the Claudia Winkleman-appointed ones. Traitors holds a particular space in our collective psyche, it being at once a delectable and somehow heart-warming show where people stab their best mates in the back. Why does it feel so good to see so many innocent British citizens so strung out?
Traitors is off to a slow start in its fourth season because, well, it’s hard to get deep with people you don’t know. The first non-celebrity eps are always a bit meet-and-greet, a bit corporate mixer: people talking about their jobs, numbering their kids, saying they’re “bubbly.” This year in the castle we have a crime-writing scarf aficionado, a gay retired police detective, a poker-playing gardener, a barrister in the open, a barrister covert. We’re done pretending that the prize money is the prize because every contestant is there for the win: for the backstabbing or the deduction. I’m not sure what it says about society that nearly all the contestants this year want to be traitors? The butter-wouldn’t-melt knitting granny? Traitor, please. The lout spinning the cap off a bottle of WKD? Traitor, please. The three feet of ex-army muscle? Traitor, please. The bloodlust is palpable.
Traitors is about the gullible and the skeptical working together to sieve the fraudulent from the truthful, an amalgamated nightmare of village idiots locking themselves in the stocks and pelting each other with rotten fruit. Sadly, we could still hear Winkleman’s 4X4 purring in the driveway as distrust emerged for the least white contestants (Ross and Judy this time, Niko and Tameka on Celebrity). It’s become impossible to ignore the depressing fact that most people are, on the whole, suspicious of people of color. Seldom has a brown person coasted through early eps without the critical gaze of fellow contestants, and eventual groupthink expulsion. For all our apparent woke-ness, we’re still apparently asleep to the racial biases that direct our attentions.
The tartan-skirted, fingerless-gloved, portrait-throwing Claudia Winkleman presides reverently and campily over the cast. (Has she ever said anything without her tongue in her cheek?) We know to expect farcical funereal scenes, lochs of floating coffins, and accusations of treachery with zero evidence to back it up. As an audience, we’re well-versed in plot twists—sporty mothers and their secret sons, magicians with assistants up their sleeves, sacrificial train travelers—and now we have a new, secret traitor; a masterminding, God-tier traitor; the Russian doll within the Russian dolls.
I will say right now that I am not enjoying the secret-traitor subplot. The whole point of watching this show is that we sit at home being all-seeing know-it-alls, oracles of how people are fucking up their own game. We know exactly who the traitors are, and one of the most delicious pleasures of the show is observing wildly inaccurate roundtable accusations based on a tilt of the head or how someone clambered out of a coffin.
The secret-traitor shtick depowers the actual traitors; we can’t see their strategy, or its possible ramifications, because their murders are being shortlisted. The existence of a secret traitor means that we don’t know if the accused is faithful or not, if the accuser is traitor or not. Most frustratingly, the secret traitor demeans us, the audience. Before, there is no sleuthing; we were all traitors, albeit passive ones, with a clear view of the entire breadth of the game. But the secret traitor leaves us all faithfully stabbing in the dark, trying to Sherlock their secret identity, figure out their moves without their confessional tapes.
