The Traitors is one of my favorite shows on television, and I am, for the most part, really enjoying the NBC adaptation featuring all randoms. I’ve watched every episode the same night it dropped, and I will continue to watch every episode as soon as they’re available. I am eating salmon at breakfast, arguing at the roundtable and putting on my cloak inside the turret. Use whatever clumsy analogy you want. I’m here for Traitors, which is why I need to say something with love: this current version is not fully working and needs an obvious change.
During Season 4 of The Traitors, which streamed on Peacock, every episode was between 59 minutes and 1 hour and 10 minutes. That’s the actual runtime not including commercials, which some subscribers get added in, depending on their plan. Every episode of Season 5, subtitled New Blood, however, has been between 41 and 42 minutes long. That’s not a surprise for network television, but unfortunately, it’s also not compatible with the actual structure of Traitors.
Most reality competition shows have a basic structure to each episode or more broadly, each elimination cycle. On Top Chef, as an example, contestants compete in a QuickFire challenge, which is followed by a quick judging panel, which is followed by an Elimination Challenge, which is followed by a longer judging panel that results in someone getting eliminated. You could talk out basically any reality competition show, whether it be Big Brother or The Voice, and you would find at least a loose version of the same thing.
Let’s go through how it looks on The Traitors. There’s a breakfast each morning where contestants find out who was murdered, which rolls into a group challenge to make money, which rolls into a roundtable where the players vote to banish someone, which rolls into a reveal of whether they were a traitor in Alan's Circle of Truth, which rolls into eating, scheming and hangout time in the castle, which rolls into a turret conversation with the traitors about who to murder, which starts the next cycle where the players discover at breakfast who was murdered and so on.
Peacock’s version of The Traitors has always played a little fast and loose with where the actual episode breaks come. Sometimes the show gives us a mid-roundtable cliffhanger. Sometimes the show cuts before we see who was murdered at breakfast. It’s less regimented than something like Survivor which always ends with Tribal Council, but the expectation is still that we see a little more or a little less than one full cycle through the game, which typically takes about an hour of screentime to properly show. Unfortunately, NBC’s version of The Traitors doesn’t have an hour to give, which either means we can’t get a full cycle of the game or the edit flies through everything so quickly that we can’t get enough confessionals from the players.
This issue wasn’t really noticeable during the first four episodes because the network released them in batches of two. That meant we got a little under an hour and a half of total gameplay time to watch in one extended viewing, but this week, the forty two minute problem was glaring.
The episode started in the middle of the roundtable. We got the rest of the banishment, the backstory behind and execution of a murder in plain sight during the hangout time and then part of the reveal of who got murdered. No challenge. No breakfast. No conversation between the actual traitors inside the turret. We just got part of a roundtable, an extended version of the post-roundtable hangout and then an elaborate set piece where everyone laid down in a grave and we found out some of the people who weren’t murdered.
To be clear, a lot of the episode was compelling. The roundtable resulted in some fun arguments, especially about Jay’s outrageous gameplay. The murder in plain sight involving an apple was edge of your seat entertainment. I had an absolute blast watching the episode, but when it was over, I was left frustrated and unfulfilled. We just didn’t get enough actual progression in the game. At first, I thought maybe I was just being a hater, but I threw on the episode recap from The Specialists, and they were even more worked up than I was.
Maybe the solution is to expand the timeslot and give us ninety minute episodes, which would be a little more than an hour of actual content. Maybe the solution is to alter the format of the NBC version a bit. Maybe the solution is to broadcast the entire season in two episode chunks so if we only get a cycle and a half during each two episode block, it still feels like enough. Maybe the solution is to abbreviate the missions on the NBC version.
This season of The Traitors is doing so much right, but I also think we need to be honest about what it’s doing wrong. The timing just feels off, and it’s never going to be the perfect companion to Peacock's celebrity version without fixing the structural issue.
