In the British and US versions, it all plays out in a remote Scottish castle – in New Zealand, it’s a luxury lodge. So far so good. But The Traitors strikes a plausibility problem early on when its assembled fresh-faced contestants are bowled over by the emergence of Paul Henry in a fedora. How can this be a surprise? Surely, the fetching back of Henry from Palm Springs to anchor a TV format and lament the state of the nation is now some sort of seasonal tradition? It’s practically Matariki.
Henry, it must be said, is in full pomp, and the show lurches between functioning as a vehicle for his personal theatre and the underlying game. It is he, presumably with some guidance from the producers, who silently ordains a few “traitors”, who will prey on the remaining contestants (“the faithful”) unless and until they are identified and banished by the group. Inevitably, the faithful will eat a few of their own as they try to weed out the traitors.
The TV format comes from the Dutch show De Verraders, which debuted in 2021 and has now been licensed in 20 countries, with hosts including Claudia Winkleman (on the BBC version) and Alan Cumming (on the US).
But it is actually based on Mafia (aka Werewolf), a “social deduction” parlour game created in 1986 by Russian psychology student Dimitry Davidoff. Its blend of roleplay and reasoning appealed to nerds, and in 2010 Wired magazine reported that it had “infected almost every significant tech event around the world” and said playing it was “your best bet of finding the most interesting people and of emerging the next morning with a couple of intriguing job offers”.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales described an all-night Werewolf session to the magazine as “a work of art”. The people who created your chosen social-media platform played this game.
But although a round of Werewolf might take half an hour around a table to complete – at which point the players compulsively launch another – The Traitors stretches on for five weeks. As compensation for the pacing, we get to listen in as the traitors conspire and their potential victims swap notes on who might be trying to metaphorically murder them all. But are they sharing with – and being manipulated by – the traitors themselves?
The 19 contestants (it’s actually 18 by the time the game starts, because A Thing Happens) are a mix of the fashion celebrities (Colin Mathura-Jeffree, Anna Reeve) and commercial broadcasters (Mike Puru, Matt Heath, Brodie Kane) who usually make up the numbers on local competitive reality shows. And there are civilians who might actually have useful social-deduction skills, including a poker player, a crime writer, an ex-cop and screen editor and Dylan Reeve, who published a book on conspiracy theories.
The format weaves in challenges that give contestants the chance to add to the cash prize fund for which they’re all competing, and Henry will, it is clear, spring surprises week by week. But the core of the show remains a game centred on the idea of the enemies who walk among us by day and murder us by night. At times, it almost seems a shame that we, the viewers, always know who’s who.
The Traitors NZ, Three, Mondays & Tuesdays from August 7, 7.30pm; ThreeNow
