The Traitors: the best reality show on television?

The BBC's hit game show "The Traitors" has returned to British screens with a new cast of contestants and some tweaks to the format that the producers hope will keep audiences hooked.

The first series was "spectacularly successful", said the i newssite's TV editor Emily Baker. It was "100% the best reality show on TV", winning a National Television Award and two Baftas, and was watched more than 34 million times on iPlayer. 

But with viewers and the new season's contestants now "wise to the game", Baker added, the show "has an uphill battle on its hands".

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'A glorified game of wink murder'

The first series of "The Traitors" was a "word-of-mouth hit" that "sounded ropey on paper", said The Telegraph. Effectively a glorified game of "wink murder", the show's "faithful" contestants aim to vote out unknown "traitors" in their midst before they themselves are "murdered", in the hope of taking home a cash prize at the end.

The format proved to be "insanely entertaining", the newspaper said – so much so that even host Claudia Winkleman urged the BBC to "not do another" series, because the first was, in her view, so perfect.

At its heart, this is merely a "child's game", said The New Statesman, "and yet 'The Traitors' is good – so good – full of betrayal, revelation and bitchiness, despite such low stakes".

As to why it is so addictive, "perhaps" it is "because the viewer is given smug omniscience – we know who the traitors are, and we watch, god-like, popcorn in hand, as chaos blooms in their wake", the magazine added.

For The Guardian, the show is "superlative TV" that has "single-handedly given the increasingly cynical and tired reality genre a new lease of life". It is "so thrilling it will make you gasp and yelp".

'Truly great reality TV'

In 2022, the nation became "gripped" by what amounted to an "illuminating experiment in the psychology of fear, group delusion, suggestion, confirmation bias, self-preservation and duplicity", said Rolling Stone.

So series 2 of "The Traitors" has "a lot to live up to", said Digital Spy. And "with anticipation comes the potential for disappointment".

Initial reviews following the show's return last week have been good though, the site noted. From "the casting of even more genuinely interesting people" to Winkleman's "wit and rollneck jumpers", the new season's premiere "felt comfortingly familiar for fans of the series".

Producers have been made some changes to the original format, however.

"You think you know how this game works," Winkleman announced in the first episode. "You don't."

Changes this time around include more "immunity" shields, which give players protection from being murdered, being offered in each of the show's elaborate challenges.

There are also other tweaks, such as faithfuls not knowing how many traitors are in their midst, and the recruitment of a fourth traitor on the first night, whose identity is kept secret from the audience.

The suspense is "so well engineered", said Rachel Aroesti in The Guardian, that when the episode ended just as the fourth traitor was about to lift their hood, "I let out an involuntary yelp of frustration".

And that response can be added to the "catalogue of small, strange sounds", such as the "hiss of thousands of gleeful hands rubbing together", that "heralds a new entry in the canon of truly great reality TV".