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.
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.