Why are we so obsessed with The Traitors?

In January "the cruellest month in a grey country", "The Traitors" has been the reality TV show keeping Hannah Ewens in the Independent going – "and, tonight, it's over".

Five players have survived banishments and murders, each hoping to win a prize pot of around £75,000 in Friday's finale. But for viewers, the real pleasure of watching is seeing people "sincerely promoting wrong and stupid theories with a vehemence in direct proportion to how wrong and stupid they are", wrote Helen Rumbelow in The Times.

In classic Dunning-Kruger style, in which "the less you know, the more you think you know", the players vastly overrate their abilities to spot liars and it is this that makes the show so "compelling".

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Human nature on display

This year's contestants have indeed shown "new lows of detective skills", said Ewens, but they are the reason the show is a hit. These are "deliriously maddening people" we all know and recognise, from "bolshy Armani" (banished for talking too much after telling fellow Traitors to do just that) to teacher Joe (who consistently convinced the others he had spotted a Traitor and was wrong each time).

The fact that viewers know all along who is a Traitor and who is a Faithful is key to the show's addictive appeal, said Filmhounds, turning us into a third character who sees everything and lets us live with the delusion that we would do better. Add in roundtables that play out like "a drunken family arguing around the dinner table on Christmas day" crossed with an episode of "The Weakest Link", along with presenter Claudia Winkleman hovering over proceedings "like the ghost of a gothic duchess", and this is "iconic television at its absolute finest".

A slice of real life

It's not just the "anthropologist people-watching element" of the show that has us hooked, said Barbara Ellen in The Observer: "there’s the sheer theatre of it all". Hooded robes, the "doomy" Traitors' Tower, a cross being drawn over the portraits of the murder victims and the feigned reactions of the Traitors to the deaths at the breakfast table, "their crocodile tears falling into the croissant baskets", are among the reasons we're enthralled.

Winkelman, too, is an important part of its success, added the paper, "channelling a hyper-stern Anne Robinson, with added Morticia Addams and a dash of a minor character from a Nancy Mitford novel".

But it is our empathy that has us hooked to "The Traitors", Victoria Richards wrote last year in The Independent. "We have all – at some point or another – either betrayed someone or been betrayed."