The BBC will be scheduling The Traitors three nights a week at 9pm for four weeks, according to Broadcast.
I don’t think there’s going to be a middle ground here, it will take off and go massive or it will be an extremely long month for the BBC (Gordon Ramsay’s Bank Balance).
Here’s the thing, it does OK in The Netherlands – it is still successful but it has failed to reach the heights of its first series, but the recent version on Australian TV has flopped quite hard despite the critics quite enjoying it and that had a similar schedule to the one our one is going to have.
It genuinely could go either way and I’m extremely excited to find out which way that is.
The Traitors, for the uninitiated, is basically a reality TV version of Werewolf/Mafia, a few people in the know must work together to take down an uninformed majority (who have no idea who The Traitors are) and must survive a series of votes and banishings. If any of the traitors make it to the end, they win the pot that everyone has been building through daily challenges. Different to something like The Mole, we know who The Traitors are and can watch the game through their experience.
I don’t know how the format works and I know this is only the second show they’ve done it with (I think?) but what is it with BBC One and three night a week strips? So… random. Their commissioners always go on about how they want their own I’m A Celeb but they never have the balls to actually schedule anything like I’m a Celeb.
The interest for me is that the game can’t be a fixed length – Werewolf ends when either the Wolves have been eliminated or when the Wolves outnumber the villagers (basically every day the townsfolk vote to kill a villager hoping they’re a werewolf, every night the wolves collaborate to kill a villager), so will episodes have fixed patterns, and if not will the timings of everything give away who the eventual winners are?
There are also daily challenges to earn money for the eventual pot and immunity from getting killed.