I am, if nothing else, a sucker for reality TV. It started with Drag Race, because of course it did, watching season 12 in lockdown and then going on to write about that season - and the show more broadly - in poems and essays; interviewing winners of international offshoots of the competition; writing about trans contestants and butch runways and how RuPaul is the show’s biggest problem. Maybe Alaska was right when, in her season 5 Roast of RuPaul, she implored the multi-hyphenate host to “please stop immediately.”
From there came a wave of other shows, either drag competitions like Dragula or reality dating shows, from the once inescapable Love Island, to the cesspit that is Married at First Sight, and the dumbest show in the world, Too Hot to Handle.
But the show that stands out among all of these is The Traitors. The UK version anyway. And the first season of the Australian one. Because watching enough of these reality dating shows, or drag competitions where the point is to become heightened and stylized to an almost uncanny degree (look no further than the ubiquitous “All Stars lips” that define the way queens look when they return to Drag Race. The people on The Traitors are, for want of a better, less loaded word: normal. The show isn’t a career stepping stone or springboard into the influencer sphere; their bodies aren’t unattainable; they look, in a way that reality contestants haven’t in years, just like you or I, dear reader.
For a while, I wondered if this mattered at all. I enjoyed the fact that The Traitors was cast in a way that felt meaningfully reflective of the UK as a whole (diverse in a number of ways), but this, in the end, is reality TV. Which is to say, not very much of it is real at all. The Traitors, in fact, gets more than most reality shows out of these ideas of performance and artifice; this months-long game of Werewolf/Mafia (delete according to taste) in an ornate Scottish manor is all about truth and lies, all about being able to present yourself as the right type of person. Which, I suppose, is to say that The Traitors is reality TV about reality TV. I’m not surprised that my parents, long-time haters of the genre (and who can blame them?) have been swept up in the drama of The Traitors, being moved close to tears by the final reveal of the first Australian season.
I don’t think this moment of conflict - between a man who needs the prize money for his family, and a woman who needs it to start IVF treatments - really works if either of them carries with them the untouchable uncanniness we’ve come to associate with reality TV contestants; these aren’t people that simply want the exposure for their brand (or to launch one), to show off their impossibly and immaculately crafted bodies. These are people for whom the results matter a great deal. At the end of the first season of The Traitors (UK), the concept of the game itself is blown wide open; an eliminated contestants offers what he calls - out loud, to everyone else in the room - “a parting gift,” pointing the finger at the final Traitor, the one man who, if left standing, will take tens of thousands of pounds from the remaining Faithful. He is, of course, eliminated, and one of the winning Faithful, Aaron, says in a confessional to the camera “I can’t wait to tell my mum I can help her buy a house”(I’m paraphrasing). This doesn’t work without the inherent normalcy of the contestants, and with it, the almost fundamental conflict that drives the show.
One of the most interesting - and at times frustrating - is the way in which (possibly) being a Traitor is treated: as a presumptive moral failing, as an act of faith from people who are Faithful and, by definition, deserving. Whether it happens or not, this deeply constructed, fictional framing seems to make people forget they’re on a reality TV show at all; forget the cameras; forget the fact these roles are made up, chosen almost from a hat, and people act in a way that’s once heightened and normal all at once. In short, peak reality TV. Everyone loves everyone and will be devastated if they’re a Traitor; one person even yells “if you vote to banish me I’ll never speak to you again.” The casting makes it feel less constructed, and even though we can see the ropes, the illusion of flight easier to buy into.
I could never get into seasons of The Traitors with celebrities on them. I say celebrities, they tend to be other reality TV show luminaries, from shows like The Bachelor, Big Brother, Selling Sunset, and, of course, Drag Race. These are people who, to borrow from a certain (unfairly maligned?) fantasy epic, “understand the way this game is played.” Maybe because we know where they come from, the artifice of the show is immediate from the off; this suddenly exists in a shared universe with Real Housewives, Below Deck, and all the other shows that the cast can be culled from. The first US season features some reality stars and some civilians, some “normal people.” The imbalance didn’t, in my admittedly limited exposure to it, create much tension, but instead brought with it the unbearable weight of expectations; expectations that the show didn’t seem to be able to get out from under.
I’m currently about halfway through the current - sixth?! - season of Too Hot to Handle, a Netflix original that feels like a variation on Love Island (“grenades” instead of “bombshells,” a villa that looks uncannily like the LI one. There’s that word again, “uncanny,” that strange space of unreality that reality TV lives in) but built around the concept that every contestant has struggled to build “meaningful connections” IRL, punishing them for indiscretions by taking money from the prize fund. For the first few seasons, it was presented as contestants going on a (fake) show that was like LI, like some kind of hedonistic partying show, only for the rug to be pulled. I struggle to believe that anyone bought into this after a season or two, but now the show has ditched this conceit: people know what they’re getting into, and it makes things dumber and funnier and somehow more tense.
There was a scene in an episode I watched last night that ended up being the catalyst for this little dispatch. Ostensible “couple” (these quotes should be read as very heavy) Demari and Bri are in a rough patch because the former went on a date with a “grenade,” extended it by an additional 30 minutes, keeping Bri in “banishment” - the show is insane, I adore it - and then kissing her, which takes $6,000 from the prize pot. The two have a confrontation, alone. They sit in front of a fountain, a perfect distance from one another so each can fit on one side of a medium shot. Nobody else in the villa of almost a dozen people is nearby. This felt aggressively staged, I even said so out loud to my brother. It doesn’t feel real - whatever that means in this context. Maybe I’m cynical but I don’t know if THTH cares about “meaningful connections.” The way the show plays out - on the nose needle drops, aggressive edits, the most mournful way you’ll ever hear anyone say “I love ass” - it cares about drama and it delivers in spades. Relationships are secondary to it, and in this episode, the seeds for conflict in the season’s next act have been laid beautifully, at the cost of reminding us how meaningless these connections seem to be.
The Traitors, by contrast, never has conversations that feel quite so staged, directed, theatrical. People are whispering, looking over their shoulder, sneaking outside to strategise. The kind of thing that could only work when they forget a camera is on them. But if you’e on THTH or LI you’re performing for the camera because of what the show, ostensibly, is for. There was a moment in season 7 where the infamous Jake wanted to wait to announce a relationship milestone so that it would play better on camera, telling the person he was coupled up with at the time to wait that little moment longer before running over to her friend to break the news.
I don’t know how much of this feeling of things being staged can be traced back to casting. If anything, it’s because of how we relate to the casting, the extent to which what we see on screen is a reflection of our reality, or a funhouse mirror interpretation of it. The Traitors has people that feel like people; Love Island is populated with, well, Love Island Contestants. This, of course, is not an inherent problem. But it does change what the shows feel like they’re about. The seasons of Love Island watched (from 2021-23, before realizing that if you stop watching it every night you simply stop caring about it) never really felt as if they were about love, just like THTH doesn’t feel like its about “meaningful connections.” This is not a world I could ever come to close to, this reality could never be mine. But The Traitors does feel like reality (a friend of mine was even asked to be on it via Instagram DM Slide) and that makes it feel both real and unreal all at once.