Why The US Version Of The Traitors Went With All Celebrities In Season 2
There's a reason producers made the big change from last season.
The US version of The Traitors is officially back and with it, almost all the elements fans loved about the first season. Host Alan Cumming and his fantastic and utterly ridiculous accent are around for season two, as are the castle, the backstabbing, the lying, the missions, Fergus, the roundtable, the slow motion murder reveals at breakfast and of course, the reality television legends. From my vantage point, pretty much the only missing elements are the unfamous contestants, and apparently there’s a reason for that.
The US version of the first season of The Traitors featured a cast that was half reality TV stars and half random people cast from off the street. The dynamic produced some really compelling relationships between the cast members and introduced fans to a few players who held their own, at least from a compelling television standpoint, but ultimately, it wasn’t enough to convince producers to go down the same road again.
Producer Sam Rees-Jones recently sat with Variety for an interview on all things Traitors Season 2 and explained why the production decided to go with all reality stars the second time around…
As we’ve seen thus far in Season 2, there are already sub-groups forming within the house, most notably those who have played reality game shows and those who are in personality-based reality shows. The Real Housewives are the most obvious example, as they often congregate together and were called out at the last roundtable by Parvati, much to the frustration of Phaedra. Based on the scenes from next week, it looks like that is going to be all kinds of messy fun, and I can’t wait to see how it plays out.
As such, it’s probably fair to speculate as to if that would even happen if there were random people in the house. Instead of seeing similarities and differences between what type of show people have been on, I think it’s likely the dividing line would have been the reality stars versus not the reality stars. So, the change-up was probably a good move from a production standpoint.
That being said, I think producers need to keep tweaking with the format and the specific rules. The Traitors seems to be a better game when people are on edge and don’t quite know what to expect. I don’t want the players to how many traitors they are. I don't want them to know who else is playing before they arrive or what wrinkles are coming; so, maybe it’ll make sense at some point in the future to bring in some more randoms for a season, or maybe at least bring back season one standouts like Quentin and Christian.
You can catch new episodes of The Traitors on Peacock on Thursday evenings. If you love reality television, particularly competition shows like Big Brother and Survivor, it’s absolutely worth a Peacock subscription.
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Mack Rawden is the Editor-In-Chief of CinemaBlend. He first started working at the publication as a writer back in 2007 and has held various jobs at the site in the time since including Managing Editor, Pop Culture Editor and Staff Writer. He now splits his time between working on CinemaBlend’s user experience, helping to plan the site’s editorial direction and writing passionate articles about niche entertainment topics he’s into. He graduated from Indiana University with a degree in English (go Hoosiers!) and has been interviewed and quoted in a variety of publications including Digiday. Enthusiastic about Clue, case-of-the-week mysteries, a great wrestling promo and cookies at Disney World. Less enthusiastic about the pricing structure of cable, loud noises and Tuesdays.