The Celebrity Traitors finally converted me

... or how I learned to love the show that is apparently super easy to love.

The past two years have been hard for me, a serial talker, sitting in conversations with people as they talk about The Traitors. The series, which has been spun off into many renditions throughout the world, including right here in Aotearoa, has a lot of fans – which surprised me, given that it seemed to me to be a televised version of Mafia, with a better score. I like Mafia as much as anybody else, but the thought of watching people play a social deduction game, regardless of how well-produced and edited it is, struck me as a bad use of my time and energy.

Look, as a rule, I’m not a reality TV person. I’m not one of those people who think it’s the culture death of society either, though. I sit somewhere in the middle. I’ve watched most of Drag Race (flagship, not the spinoffs, there’s only so many hours in the day), a couple of episodes of various Housewives franchises, recapped several seasons of Dancing with the Stars and watched Nicole Scherzinger commit war crimes against Rachel Crow on The X-Factor US.

It’s also, frankly, a massive time commitment. Anything that is more than one episode a week is too much for me. I think human beings get a limited amount of things to commit ludicrous amounts of time to – kids, pets, hobbies, fairly obscure JRPGs that require hundreds of hours across decades and an encyclopaedic memory to keep track of lore. To add keeping track of reality television on top of all that (or one of them, any guess which one I commit to).

This weekend, however, I found myself with the sort of time that someone has when they don’t have kids, pets, hobbies or potentially have run out of JRPGs to spend hundreds of hours on. After watching the extremely middling “lady who thinks sane things but is a bit crazy about it” Keira Knightley thriller The Woman in Cabin 10, I had some hours free, and it popped up so I thought, “What’s the worst that can happen?”

And, just like everybody who has laid eyes on the castle or heard the haunting choral covers of pop songs, I was hooked.

The Celebrity Traitors feels, to me, like the perfect entry point to the series – especially if you happen to be a millennial with an intermediate knowledge of British celebrities. The premise of the show completely failed to grab me in any of its other iterations. Seeing a group of people I’m unfamiliar with be bad at both lying and deduction doesn’t appeal to me, whether they be genuinely non-famous people, reality stars, or a mixture of the two (and hey, many reality TV stars are, in fact, not famous).

Part of the thrill of Celebrity Traitors for me is the chance to see celebrities I generally enjoy show a different side of themselves.. Celia Imrie not trusting anybody? Here for it. Lucy Beaumont being lightly baffled by seemingly everything? I’m already signed up. Tom Daley being generally cheerful and gormless while making me realise that I’ve never actually heard him talk? Sure! It’s like finding out someone you’ve been friends with for years has an amazing singing voice.

Another part of the thrill, which I understand is common to all series of The Traitors filmed in the UK, is Claudia Winkleman. Winkleman might well be the most wildly charismatic host to grace our screens since Nicole Byer looked at a terrible cake on Nailed It. She stalks the set like a glamorous Grim Reaper, with a half-smile that would make Anne Robinson proud, and even more crucially, sets the tone between the absolute high stakes of the show (people are going to get murdered by the traitors, weekly) and how silly it is (nobody is going to get “murdered”). The first murder in this season was so casually and brutally performed by Winkleman that I gasped. 

It’s not all roses, though. I can firmly leave Stephen Fry, who continues to be the biggest beneficiary of the assumption that a plum British accent in any way correlates to superior intelligence. Another mainstay of the reality TV format – the talking head – that is very much present here has also never really appealed to me, as it seems to cater to people who are drifting in and out of watching the show rather than actually watching. It’s easy to pad an episode out to an hour when you are not only watching the drama, but watching someone comment on the drama, then someone comment on someone’s comment on the drama, repeated ad nauseam. And frankly, not all narrators are born (or cast) equal.

The rules also, at a glance, seem weighted far too much in the favour of the traitors, but I realise griping about the rules of a show I just discovered makes me seem like the kind of pedant that’s better found on Bluesky, so I’ll stop. If the first two episodes are any indicator, The Celebrity Traitors looks to be a genuinely enjoyable season of reality TV. Will it make me a convert to the other seasons? Maybe if they cast Celia Imrie every season.

The Celebrity Traitors UK airs on ThreeNow in New Zealand, and probably somewhere else if you live somewhere else.