Week-to-Week: The Real Traitors Prize was the Faithful We Sacrificed Along The Way
A meta-reality narrative helps the ugly end of The Traitors season two feel pretty good
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Note: this week’s newsletter will spoil the end of The Traitors U.S. season two.
Last week, Fox’s new game show The Floor finished its first season with a whimper. Technically, it delivered on what the premise (based on a Dutch format, like so many other reality/game shows) promised: two players faced off in the rapid-fire trivia game for the $250,000 prize.
However, because of how the show is organized, those players were basically strangers. Over the course of the series, players gained large territories on the titular game board, winning across multiple weeks and earning the title of “whale.” But because the game forces you to work outside of your specialty, one by one the whales were all eliminated, and instead players who were just standing there the whole time ended up being the ones fighting it out at the end.
I tried to get producers from the show to talk to me about how they felt the format hampered their effort to build “characters” in an ongoing series, but I had no luck, which is probably for the best: I would have spent the conversation not-so-subtly pitching my fixes for the series (short version: when contestants have the most territory in a given week, they can choose between banking the $20,000 prize or passing on it to lock in their floor until the final two episodes). But when I was at Press Tour last month, and I had a captive audience in The Traitors producer Sam Rees-Jones at an end-of-day cocktail party (inspiring my previous newsletter on the show), I couldn’t help but dig into my similar reservations about the endgame of the reality series.
Admittedly, a lot of my problems with the end of the first U.S. season were tied to the mix of civilian and celebrity players. In a season where a traitor wins, there is always an inherent bit of unpleasantness, as victory must always sit alongside betrayal. But this was especially exaggerated when it was Cirie—a Survivor veteran who approached the game very strategically—and random civilians who were really unable to wrap their heads around the idea of gameplay and took the situation too personally. And while I thought Cirie deserved to win, and thought Andie and Quentin were being unreasonable, I can’t deny that the narrative of a reality star dunking on regular people like this wasn’t a satisfying ending. It felt bad in a way that I don’t want from the end of a reality show.
As I ranted to Rees-Jones (a patient man just trying to enjoy his cocktail, mostly, although he seemed to appreciate my investment on the whole), he wondered aloud how I would feel about the second season’s endgame, based on my objections to the first. It was something I’ve had in the back of my head as we’ve worked through the back section of the season, but going into last night’s finale I didn’t really see how there was going to be much drama. With only one traitor left in the game, the chances of Kate surviving a murder, a banishment, and then the Fire of Truth were slim to none—presuming the producers wouldn’t allow her to try to murder the shielded MJ to create the illusion where wasn’t still a traitor, the remaining players were going to keep banishing until a traitor was revealed, and Kate’s turn against Phaedra and late entry to the game made her too conspicuous. She was lucky to survive the banishment after C.T. turned on Sandra, but she never going to survive the Fire of Truth.
As such, I went into it wondering why Rees-Jones would be interested in my response: it was clearly set up, as Kate thought when she exited, for the remaining Faithful to celebrate a clean-cut victory. That said, I wasn’t entirely shocked when I saw Trishelle vote to continue banishing, given she had been clear in her reaction to C.T. changing the plan on the Sandra vote that it raised her ongoing paranoia about his trustworthiness. But I was shocked when C.T. did the same in a purported effort to remove any and all doubt with M.J., and was flabbergasted when the vote turned into a three-way tie after a confused M.J. threw her hands up in the sky and voted for Trishelle.
In a way, it’s an ending that mirrored last season’s: you have two gamers who are really leaning into the game’s themes of mistrust, and then a Bravolebrity (the equivalent of civilians in this dynamic) who is just playing off vibes and doesn’t understand why they can’t all just be winning as faithfuls. And when they revoted, we were reminded that M.J. just doesn’t have a gamer mind: sure, her vote didn’t matter once Trishelle regained her faith in C.T. and switched her vote to M.J., but she still should have changed it to C.T. in case Trishelle had kept her nerve. And like Andie and Quentin before her, M.J. held a grudge about how this ending played out, coming into the reunion with a lot of bitterness and no forgiveness for what was ultimately a needless exercise that cost her over $60k.
The difference, though, is that M.J. is not a regular person, and the tension we saw play out in these final moments was a satisfying microcosm of the season’s ongoing battle between the Gamers and the Bravo stars. C.T. and Trishelle have been insisting in interviews that they came by their paranoia honestly, and weren’t just conspiring to split the money two ways, and certainly the chaos of the finale supports that idea from Trishelle’s perspective (I’m less convinced by C.T.). And this kind of inter-Faithful conflict is a far more satisfying endpoint than one involving a traitor, because it’s about the psychological impacts of playing the game, and how the meta-reality television narratives played over top of that. As presented, C.T. reached a point at the end where as long as he could keep voting, he considered it necessary to remove any and all doubt, because why wouldn’t you? And so even if they had stuck with voting out Kate at the final roundtable, you sense that C.T. would have still gone after M.J. (and Sandra) because in an individual game why wouldn’t you cover your bases when you have an established ally you can trust?
There’s still an element of ugliness here, but it’s ugliness that enriches the game instead of spoiling the other players’ victory. I didn’t even watch the reunion in season one, because it just felt like it would be awkward, but this time it felt like the perfect dessert to the season as a whole. I loved watching the players reacting to what we had just watched, and any of the residual drama we saw felt right at home in a room full of reality TV veterans and celebrities. Sure, I wish John had stopped piping up in situations where he had nothing compelling to offer, and I wanted Andy to more actively question why in the hell he was even part of the show, but it provided some compelling perspective on the Gamer vs. Housewives battle. It may have been an ugly and messy conclusion, but it’s an ugly and messy game, being played by contestants who are well-versed in those conditions and able to navigate their personal and professional identities with either a productive self-awareness or an engaging lack thereof.
And so while I don’t know if Rees-Jones and the other producers will be able to recapture the specific energy of this group of Gamers and Housewives, this cast really brought a whole new dimension to our understanding of how The Traitors as a game is meant to end. Sandra’s strategy of consciously eliminating faithful was foreshadowing for how C.T. and Trishelle would bring the game to a close, and while as a Survivor fan I’m disappointed she couldn’t make it to the end, she still played her part in developing a new set of rules that the next group of celebrity contestants will be playing with in season three. I imagine that the producers will try to find some new angles as well, but their player pool is absolutely well-versed enough in the culture of reality celebrity that they’ll be bringing these narratives to bear in what follows.
As I discussed in my previous newsletter, I’ll be interested in how people who aren’t as well-versed adapt to this new normal. For me, while I can understand how people who don’t watch a lot of reality programming might have struggled with this season upfront, I think those who stuck with it have probably gotten a really helpful entry point to The Discourse, and a primer they can easily take into the third season. I’m sure Peacock is tracking how many viewers are diving into the Housewives series, and I imagine that we’re seeing an uptick in people checking out Challenge, Big Brother, and Survivor seasons on Paramount+ as well (a perfect bit of convergence if these marginal streaming services should ever choose to merge). Some may still choose to step away from the franchise with its future being so tied to reality television as a genre, but this chaotic endgame offered a great insight into how the established narratives and characters being brought into the game can create endings that bring guilt-free drama civilian-only seasons would struggle to match.
Stray observations
I say that having never actually finished one of the civilian-only international seasons that are on Peacock, which I’ll probably get to gradually over the break between U.S. seasons. So don’t spoil any of those endings, but I imagine there’s lots of other variations beyond what the U.S. series has had on offer.
I’ll acknowledge that my The Floor plan has one key flaw, which is that if contestants are allowed to lock in their floor, there’s a problem if their territory has completely blocked off another contestant. But I figure you just make it so they can jump over that territory to challenge anyone adjacent to it. I just think the game becomes far more compelling if your final rounds are a tournament of champions rather than “people who got lucky late in the game.”
After having lost full cast reunions on Survivor, I appreciated that we were able to get reflections from players like Peppermint in the Traitors reunion, even if I didn’t care nearly as much about most of the other early boots getting to say things.
I really appreciated Parvati standing by her “performance” comment about the Housewives. The other statements that Janelle and Dan made were clearly dismissive of them, but Parvati was riffing on how the performative qualities of Housewives would help them play the game. She underestimated just how well it served them, and how much offense Phaedra would take to the variation on the idea that she is “fake,” but she isn’t wrong that it’s a key part of those shows, and I’m glad she was like “actually, no, Phaedra is an amazing performer.”
They’re remaining tight-lipped on casting, but I have to think that we’ll see continued representation from all of the existing reality franchises, but probably with some new ones thrown in. Rees-Jones continued to feel like athletes and the like remain in the mix, but they’ve really got to find the right ones who can follow the bouncing ball, genre-wise.
I am about as ruthlessly competitive as my loved ones can tolerate - and sometimes more - but to me, CT's final moves were a fully intentional and entirely unnecessary heel turn. He knew full well that MJ was faithful, and any protestations to the contrary rang hollow, because we all saw MJ's contributions to the game. You've won the game. Don't take prize money out of your teammate's pockets.
Three thoughts:
1) I audibly gasped when Trishelle revealed "CT" on her ballot. That was legitimately shocking to me.
2) I wish there was some sort of incentive to banish traitors during the early and middle part of the game; maybe anyone who votes to banish one successfully is personally guaranteed money? Or this bonus money just gets added to the big pot? I just think Sandra's strategy to keep traitors around for a good chunk of the show, while sound under current rules, does feel a bit antithetical to the whole point of the faithfuls?
2) I would LOVE Myles (or another EM contributor) to cover season 3 of the show! I have to imagine there's as much potential material as a Survivor season to write about? (But I don't watch that show so maybe I'm just being biased haha.)