The Traitors Has a Glaring Flaw When It Comes to the Actual Game

The third season of The Traitors is now in the books, with a whopping four Faithfuls splitting the — pretty meager, tbh — $204,000 prize pot. (The winning team on Pop Culture Jeopardy! got $300,000 and only had to split it three ways!) For the first time in the U.S. edition, the winners aren’t alumni of social-strategy competition shows. Instead, we got a mix: Real Housewife Dolores Catania, Bachelor alum Gabby Windey, social-media star/celebrity relative Dylan Efron, and royal Lord Ivar Mountbatten. This was, to put it mildly, not a quartet we ever expected to see left standing.

Which is not to say the season overall was a dud. Far from it, honestly. The fireworks up in the Traitors turret were as explosive as they’ve ever been, and watching Danielle Reyes, Boston Rob Mariano, Carolyn Wiger, and Bob the Drag Queen blow up their own games by targeting each other was a thrill. Meanwhile, both Dylan and Gabby were hugely likeable personalities and made enough shrewd reads throughout the season to make their victories feel more than satisfying.

The Traitors is a good TV show, but at the same time, it remains a massively frustrating game. The fact that Dolores (who I love!) and Ivar (who is Ivar) were able to win the season without ever making any kind of tactical play or, in Dolores’s case, having even the faintest clue as to the identity of the Traitors is a glaring flaw, one made all the more enervating by the fact that the show’s producers could easily make some tweaks to shore up the competition end of the game. If you take a given season of The Traitors and divide it into four major elements — the casting, the selection and replenishment of Traitors, the competitions, and the strategy — it’s easier to see where the show is succeeding and where it’s failing.

Keep the Mix of Gamers and Misfits (But Dig Deeper)

No notes! Or, okay, very few notes. This is the element of The Traitors (U.S.) that is working the best. The mix of “gamers” (e.g., alumni from social strategy shows like Survivor, Big Brother, and The Challenge) and more sedentary reality stars has mostly worked. The gamers hit the ground running and bring their baggage from previous shows in order to establish day-one story lines. Danielle and Britney Haynes’s carry-over hard feelings from Big Brother: Reindeer Games was mentioned within the first minute of the season, and it stayed relevant until the final episode. Meanwhile, the casting of non-competitive-reality celebs has been a consistent success: Dylan and Gabby this season; Pilot Pete Weber, Phaedra Parks, and John Bercow last year; queen Kate Chastain in season one. What Tom Sandoval didn’t deliver in coherent or effective gameplay he more than made up for in facial expressions and a cappella singing. Even Robyn Dixon, though she didn’t last long, was more engaged on this show than she’d been on the last several seasons of The Real Housewives of Potomac.

And there is so much more territory still to traverse. While Survivor’s Jeff Probst continues to grumble about The Traitors poaching his alumni, he’s only going to be able to cast so many people on his show’s upcoming 50th season. Anyone who doesn’t make the cut can have Alan Cumming’s fashion kilts to run to. Here’s hoping the producers feel free to expand beyond the Gamer-Housewife binary too. There are so many reality TV luminaries to be found in every corner of the industry. I continue to hold a candle for the eventual casting of Tim Gunn, Tabatha Coffey, Barbara Corcoran from Shark Tank, and any of the dozens of Top Chef/Food Network all-stars. Put Bobby Flay up in that turret! This means fewer Ivars and more dips into the Vanderpump Rules well. Cast Scheana Shay and then watch her break down when you bring Tom Sandoval back for another music challenge.

Ease Up on the Gamer Traitors

The open mutiny staged by Bob the Drag Queen, Boston Rob, Danielle, and Carolyn up in that turret was quite entertaining, but it demonstrated just how far the envelope ought to be pushed when putting big, stubborn personalities under the Traitor hoods. The show could benefit from subverting expectations in season four. Don’t cast any gamers as Traitors next time. Put one of the quieter personalities under the hood and make them come out of their shell. Do it for no other reason than the players themselves are incredibly aware of how reality TV gets produced. They’re the raptors who know how to open doors and producers need to stay one step ahead.

One thing that seemed obvious despite the fact that show producers tried to downplay it was that this season’s cast played the meta game hard. In the absence of any other evidence, the cast simply pointed accusatory fingers at the people who seemed like Traitors “Alan” (i.e., production) would pick. In other words, with four Housewives and four Survivor alumni in the cast, the players assumed one of each was likely a Traitor. They ended up being half right, but there’s a good reason why five of the first seven eliminated players were either Housewives or Survivors. In The Traitors’ three seasons, the producers have selected four Survivor alums, three Big Brother alums, one Housewife, and one Drag Race queen as Traitors. If they’re smart, they will swerve far away from CBS reality alums next time. Instead, the show should dive back into the Housewives well. Phaedra was one of the best U.S. Traitors we’ve had, and the easiest way to make sure a Dolores doesn’t float to the end on the wings of bad reads and noncommittal gameplay is to make her a Traitor.

Make the Competitions Twistier

This is the big one — the area of improvement I harp on to anyone who makes the mistake of asking me if I’m a fan of The Traitors. The competitions need to have meaning beyond prize money! The audience doesn’t care about the prize money, and neither do the contestants. Yes, you can win a shield to keep you safe from that night’s murder, but that’s not enough. Every competition needs to contain within it something that could help the Faithful suss out the Traitors. A huge problem in the show’s strategy is that too often, the players are just acting on gut feelings. All it takes is one halfhearted suspicion to get someone banished. See poor Nikki Garcia this season, done in by Chrishell Stause reading one facial expression wrong.

Each competition should have some sort of hidden clue to the Traitors’ identities. Take a lesson from summer’s best reality show, Claim to Fame: Plant some esoteric hints throughout the challenge area that signal pieces of the Traitors’ identities. This is something the U.S. version could easily institute before other versions, since everybody on the show is a public figure.

Meanwhile, the Traitors should have to accomplish a secret task in every competition that runs counter — or at least parallel — to the greater group’s task. Maybe there should be a side pot (the Traitor’s Share) that would go only to a Traitor should they win. Add to that pot every time a Traitor is able to surreptitiously accomplish tasks during each challenge. It doesn’t need to be sabotage — let The Mole keep that to itself — but the Traitors should be forced to work in secret in some way that will give the Faithfuls more opportunities to clock sketchy behavior.

Also, there should be more competitions that force the players to make social choices and piss each other off. The rafting challenge from this season’s premiere was a perfect example. The team had a group task to accomplish, yes, but at every checkpoint, people had to make the decision to be selfish or selfless, and the selfish ones got rewarded while the selfless were left abandoned and miserable on the loch. We were a few blessed hours from Dorinda going full Berkshires on the group, and that kind of thing needs to be happening every week.

Nullify the “Traitor Angel” Strategy

So the elephant in the room that you’d only really know about if you’re a few levels deep into Reddit boards or listening to the cast members’ podcasts is the so-called “Traitor Angel” strategy. This goes back to season two, when Survivor’s Sandra Diaz-Twine essentially broke the game in a strategy session by the pool table. The long and short of it: The Traitors is ultimately a numbers game just like any vote-off show, and if you have an alliance of sufficient numbers, you can dictate whom you want to banish. And since you don’t win the game by banishing the most Traitors but instead by getting to the end — past most of your fellow Faithfuls — and then eradicating the Traitors who remain, it would behoove Faithfuls to simply form an alliance and vote out whoever seems to be threatening your members, and if your alliance contains a Traitor or two, better to keep them around (and loyal to you) rather than eliminate them and start over trying to figure out which new Traitor was recruited instead.

The Traitor Angel strategy is an extension of that, which says your main objective should be finding a Traitor, making an alliance with that Traitor, and then riding them to the end, where you will ideally then banish them and take the money for yourself. It’s been widely noted that both Britney and Dylan were probably doing this very thing with Danielle (I suspect Dylan was doing this with Boston Rob as well). Both Britney and Dylan have quiet-confirmed this. (Yes, Britney and Danielle both stressed at the reunion that Danielle never told Britney she was a Traitor, since that would be breaking the rules, but Britney still knew.)

This is good strategy if you’re a Faithful, but bad strategy if you’re a Traitors producer, since they clearly don’t want to publicize a tactic that involves making an end run around the whole point of the game. And so if they can’t show the Traitor Angel strategy on TV, they need to find a way to complicate the game to a point where that strategy is no longer advantageous.

One possible solution floated by Tony Vlachos after his elimination was to incentivize voting out Traitors and/or penalize voting out Faithful. Say everybody who casts a vote to banish a player who turns out to be a Faithful are then the ones up for murder that night. Or casting a successful vote to banish a Traitor gets you a secret advantage to be played later. If the smart way to play is to carry a Traitor to the end, the show needs to make that a far riskier proposition than it currently is.

One complication that was thrown into the game at the last possible moment was the role of the Seer, the one player with the power to privately ask any one other player whether or not they’re a Faithful, and that player must answer truthfully. Ultimately, the Seer was introduced far too late in the season for it to make any real difference, but it’s a fun idea. And since The Traitors is just tartaned-up Mafia anyway, the producers should take a cue from that game and introduce other non-Traitor roles into the mix. Have someone assume the role of Prosecutor, whose task is to rally the group to eliminate one particular person, and if they can’t do it, they get banished. This is ultimately a very silly game that is only enhanced by Alan Cumming getting deliciously dramatic about it all. There should be no limit on how many twists he’s allowed to throw into the game.

The bottom line is that if The Traitors is going to be a show about paranoia and suspicion, the gameplay needs to really crank up the paranoia and suspicion. No one’s sole defense against being accused of being a Traitor should ever be, “I swear, I am 100 percent a Faithful!” Their defense needs to be, “I saw Derrick remove a chalice from the chapel during the competition, and I think the book in the library about the Boston Tea Party that was left on the floor implicates Rob, and my role as the Witness means I know one of the Traitors was in the kitchen during the murder-in-plain-sight last night.”

More clues. Fewer vibes. Scheana for season four.