The Traitors Needs To Learn An Important Lesson From Survivor

We’re likely days away from the cast being announced for The Traitors Season 4, and to say I’m excited would be an understatement. The new-ish reality show has shot up my list of personal favorites over the past few years, and I cannot wait to see how the game continues to evolve.

If that felt like a bit of a backhanded compliment, it was. There’s a lot that is absolutely fantastic about The Traitors, especially its ability to bring fun personalities from various reality universes together, but the basic game and format of the show itself still need some tweaking. The recipe isn’t quite right, and there’s no shortage of editorials from various people (including me) with proposed rule changes and new possible wrinkles that could help fix things.

I’m not going to get that deep in this article though. I’m sure they’ll continue trying new things until the rules work a little better. That’s not my focus here though. Instead, I’m going to propose one suggestion that’s far easier to implement. I’m going to suggest The Traitors take a page from the Survivor playbook and let contestants be honest and direct about the actual game they’re playing in their confessionals.

Let’s back up real quick to the beginning of Survivor. The show was originally designed as a social experiment, and the assumption was that people would be voted off if they were, you know, bad at surviving or lazy. That stuff still does matter a little bit, but mostly, people make decisions based on which other players they want to work with to try and get themselves to the end of the game. Richard Hatch didn’t win because he was the best literal Survivor, although he was good at fishing, he won because he outthought the other people.

Survivor, to its credit, has mostly embraced this chaos. Instead of pushing contestants to play the game as they originally designed it, producers just let the players do what they were going to do and then pushed them to talk about it in their interviews. That’s meant we’ve openly got confessionals about eliminating people for all the wrong reasons or throwing challenges or keeping bad players in the game on purpose.

The Traitors needs to lean into that. During the second season, Survivor legend Sandra openly talked to the other players about how The Traitors is actually a game of numbers and they should be leaning into alliances. She also talked about how frustrating it is when a traitor is voted out because then you have to start over and find a new traitor. In her exit interview with EW, she talked about how her plan was to intentionally get close to traitors and keep them around so they wouldn’t murder her.

The show gave us bits and pieces of her talking about strategy and gameplay, but it didn’t show a lot of the conversation and never fully leaned in and let her just say that during a confessional. We never got her speaking to the camera and saying here’s what I’m trying to do and why.

In her own exit interviews, Big Brother favorite Britney who made a deep run during Season 3 has talked about being shocked by how messy and chaotic Danielle was inside the castle. Fans are convinced she knew Danielle was a traitor pretty early in the show, but never said it during a confessional, potentially because the show doesn’t want contestants to talk about intentionally keeping traitors around.

The Traitors seems to want to present itself in a certain light. It pretends contestants are trying really hard during the challenges when they’re quite clearly not. It wants to pretend that the best thing for the faithfuls in any given moment is to banish a traitor at the roundtable. It wants to pretend that everyone is playing the game by the basic rules of the show, but that’s quite clearly not what’s happening.

Smarter contestants like Sandra are scheming and conspiring to get themselves to the end, and instead of downplaying that, The Traitors should be leaning into that. It would make for a better show, and it would allow the producers to evolve the game in better and more interesting ways.