The BBC have announced a start date for The Traitors: Tuesday 29th November, 9:30pm, immediately after the England vs Wales World Cup match – they really believe in this, that lead-in is likely to be extremely big. It’s going to be on three times a week, but the three episodes will be up on iPlayer after the first episode of the week (this strikes me as a bit weird towards the end so I wonder if the final episodes will only go up after broadcast). I suspect the plan is ITV football game counterprogramming, but it’s quite possible they’ll go out after BBC games as well. It should finish around Christmas? Could it end on Xmas Day?
Again – should temper expectations – this hasn’t universally succeeded (and in fact has flopped massively in Australia recently), but Studio Lambert have shown they’ve got decent chops for this sort of thing so we’re keeping our fingers crossed.
Well my interest is piqued! Which countries has it been shown in so far and which countries was it a hit in?
Started in The Netherlands – first series was massive but diminishing returns (also played with celebrities), Belgium, France (did well) and Norway. Did badly in Australia.
Was Australia the only place it flopped? I’m wondering how long a shelf life it has as a format.
As far as I know, there are some big territories it’s sold to going out next year – the US version has been made back to back with ours with the same production team and with Alan Cumming hosting, which might be an ingenious choice.
The Australian one was well liked by people I know who watched it, so it’s not like it was crap, but just didn’t catch on.
I stuck with the Australian show but it has a few problems. I am not sure I can say everything without giving away potential spoilers as to what may happen in the UK version so will keep any twists and such to myself.
However one thing I could never get past was the Traitors and Faithfuls working towards the same prize pot. This made it so much easier for the Traitors to hide their identity. I would have much rather every bar in the silver challenge lost went into a separate Traitor pot to encourage them to blow cover. Apart from 1 of the vote offs I never really thought a traitor blew their cover and it was dumb luck or traitors sabotaging eachother that resulted in a traitor going home.
I also thought most of the challenges on the whole were boring and the way the format works the interesting players got murdered right away so it meant you just had Faithfuls frightened to do or say anything on fear of murder.
The votes offs often were a name being thrown out and everyone else just jumping on to avoid elimination. It often felt like people were being voted out more for their personality than being a traitor
New trailer out on IPlayer
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0d8h8s3
I’m not sure about the casting there does not seem to be a huge range of ages they all seem to be 20-40
The vibe for this seems very wrong and why is Claudia Winkleman presenting this? Having seen the Australian version that is absolutely the wrong choice. Should have been Rick Edwards.