It was a fascinating study in human behaviour. I've spent a bit of time on the Traitors reddit and people HATE that series. As I understand Oz has cancelled the show in the wake of it (was before the recent UK & US series blew up so perhaps they might change their minds).
People hate it because it was so frustrating watching the faithfuls fail to spot the obvious - but I'm with you, I think subconsciously they all knew what was going on and were scared and acted on instinctive self preservation. And I also think that's why viewers hated it so much, because it's a deeply uncomfortable truth about human nature and group dynamics. Someone said that it was basically coercive control and I think that's bang on.
I don't actually think Sam played it all that well either, I think it was a combination of intimidation and a certain chance that there weren't enough strong figures at key points to organise against him or speak out at the round table and call out what he was doing - ie: you come for me and I'll take you down.
Psychopaths/sociopaths don't tend to have good models of others' inner lives and motivations and I don't think he did, which is why he blew up at the end when Camille didn't follow the script, even though she had no reason to do as he wished. In an interview afterwards she intimated that there was much more that was cut where he blew up at her, a real narc rage outburst.
Incidentally I thought it was a bit of a cheap trick to introduce the 'Traitor's dilemma' at the end from nowhere. Given there is no way to 'win' a prisoners' dilemma dynamic - if you trust then you're the sucker - then if it was coming then the remaining traitors had to ensure that they manipulated the situation to make sure there were no other traitors left by the end. The ending was inevitable once the producers stepped in.
I would have burned the world down had Sam walked with the money so having him taken down by the fact he was so good at manipulating people seemed like poetic justice - and the fact no one got any money after all of that seemed tragically beautiful in a way. As Auden said, we must love one another or die.
I do think he played 'well', eliminating the competent, his main error being to leave so many other traitors in place at the end. He genuinely seemed to think they'd feel safe to share the money with him. The madness of entitlement.
What I find so interesting about the Traitors is that it holds a mirror to us all. Really the faithful have nothing much to go on when deciding who is a traitor so it brings out all the unconscious bias, predjudices, etc. Sexism, racisim, ageism, etc.
I am neurodivergent and the neurodivergent people on the shows (I've watched a lot - the US, Aus, Norway, and UK) always get banished early. They get voted off because 'somethings not quite right' or 'I just don't trust him, I don't know why'. It has gotten to the point that when they introduce the contestants I can guess how far they will go by their occupation. Software developer? Aerospace engineer? They are mostly voted off episode one or two. It is a sweeping generalisation of course -the UK season 2 had a couple of people who had a whiff of being on the autistic spectrum get quite a long way through.
The individual and collective misogyny (and probably homophobia and racism) felt like the big themes of the show. It was also notable that the clever women like Annabelle were banished while the clever men like Luke were murdered. A real lesson for producers in a) don’t have a psychopath as a Traitor b) don’t have a mix of clever/confident people and stupid/unconfident people and end up with only the latter group and a bully c) make sure everyone understands the rules d) call time at the right points in banishment to get rid of the people you need to get rid of for the benefit of a good show like the UK producers do e) it’s not fun to watch a bully and even the catharsis of him getting some comeuppance at the end doesn’t make up for the unpleasantness of the second half of the second half of the series.
As an Australian who just discovered all versions of the show (just finished Aus S2 yesterday) I’m sorry it got cancelled however since the first season was so badly edited and the second they let chug along into oblivion (however satisfying the ending was), these are obviously not the producers who should be making the show. Hopefully a reboot can be made by people with a clue (happy to keep Rodger). Sam was repellent (just hate, not love to hate like a good villain) but I admit I did do a lot of screaming at Sarah - how many times can one person talk herself out of the blinding obvious?
Yes, there’s lots of stuff they could have done to up the difficulty gradient for the Traitors. But it was like Heart of Darkness, they’d all gone mad and couldn’t stop
The moment Sam took a glass of bubbly for thousands of dollars and just threw it on the ground for fun was one of the most horrifying moments of TV I've ever seen. The guy is a monster.
Yes! How did that task—and the total lack of team spirit—not come up again. I like to think that’s when Camille thought “you selfish bastards” and made her call on the final.
Australian Traitors spoilers! Wasn’t he just the worst most entitled brat. I screamed at the tv for most of the season and then witchy-laughed my way through the closing credits. A terrible show/season overall but some real big emotions in those last 10 minutes ooooeeeee
The mention of podcasts/bartlett/huel/thumbnails reminded me of a colleague of mine who found that Huel’s latest Greens product causes, shall we say, explosive digestive responses (essentially D&V every time he tried it, he tried a surprising amount of times)
I was considering sending him every thumbnail permutation of that product that I have seen on YouTube (there are a lot) but wasn’t sure whether that would constitute poor interpersonal skills in the workplace.
Confident this isn’t the sort of response you were looking for when you posted that, but here we are.
I'm thinking you mean Owen Jones or Giles Coren (I'm sure they would be thrilled at the comparison)? The thing that got me Traitors AU2: is how every woman who figured it out was immediately & so easily dismissed. And all the men seemed to stick to believing the Sheriff. The only woman who survives it literally has to nuke the prize from everyone! This is a metaphor right? People were literally afraid of the sheriff but why so much? I'm looking forward to the discussion because I've been thinking about it a lot.
Someone on Reddit said this season was a good way to understand eg Stalinist purges. The theory is that the faithfuls, deep down, knew about Sam but they were scared of him and so gratefully latched on to any reason to vote for someone else.
One thing that’s very noticeable in the tasks is that there’s not much fun being had, or camaraderie on display.
This makes a lot of sense. But why so scared? What was it that he was able to put out there? There is something very, deeply sinister about this series. And also: this is very true about the tasks. I had a feeling they all deeply disliked each other.
He was a big guy — well over 6ft — and clearly an imposing presence. Look at his rage right at the end. I can imagine he was rough to go up against, particularly once people had seen what happened to the last person who tried it.
And - I live in Kosovo - see this phenomenon a lot. Of one person with power, always male here, manipulating and using that power to control people. As much as people know & understand what is happening they simply can't bring themselves to call it out for self preservation. Its a toxicity and coldness that envelops everyone. In the UK version you had a less scary guy. But *the* guy. And everyone banded together to stop him even tho it seemed like he was easily going to run away with it all. So there it seems there was more friendliness and willingness to trust each other. That toxicity hadn't settle in. I think the combination of famous & non famous people was an issue as well. It's a bad combo for this game.
This was something we commented on when watching - they didn't really appear to form any friendships or bonds, or at least none that were obvious to the viewer. The completely in your face way that people would just walk up to a group and pull someone away for a private chat, immediately and obviously saying who they wanted to vote out, was so different to the UK version. When the banished claimed "I love you guys!" before departing, I kind of believed them. There were no such claims in the Australian (or American) version!
I think Sam had a strategy of breaking up friendships so the only bonds that remained were with him. He actively created that atmosphere of distrust and unease, and sadly they fluffed their chances at offing him (including the other traitor who turned back from the gates of hell just as he was about to go to war with Satan)
Anyone else watching Traitors, especially the Australian version, think, yeah, i wouldn't last a week if the Tardis took me back to medieval times. The Monty Python holy grail witch trial scene had more logic than the typical banishment vote on Traitors Oz.
In terms of game logic it’s too easy for traitors to select which faithfuls they want to keep for the final rounds.
Remember Mike Reid’ runaround? When contestants could change their answer when they could see how the others had answered? There’s an article somewhere about the traitors and voting systems….Traitors on an alternative vote system anyone :-)
And oh yeah, Australia’s most decorated cop……strewth!
Janice Turner as a consummate columnist has that great ability to interview and present a variety of perspectives which I do find occasionally refreshing. That said, Badenoch's comments about her own upbringing and introduction to Britain bears reflection as often articulate new citizens' worldview is shaped far more precisely than the standard PPE route.
Ah Traitors S2, compulsive stuff... I agree it shows an intrinsic limitation of the game that only the traitors can be 100% sure of who's lying or not (cf Mollie not wanting to ditch Harry in case Jas was wrong about him). In the UK version, the producers were happy to throw more curve-balls (eg murder in the open - which did for Miles) to even things up a bit. Overall, the UK version is curated much better, including having contestants who know each irl, which is a much better device than including some random reality celebrities. Shame they've cancelled it, also Rodger was an excellent host.
“They reign supreme in the public eye for about seven years or so”
There is also the ‘7 year itch’ for relationships
Now I read once that all your cells in your body replace every 7 years, so my thinking is that in a way you are a completely different person today than you were 7 years ago, like an actually physically different new thing
So for the 7 year itch I started to think this isn’t a coincidence and now I have another data point for my (frankly insane) theory
Once read a theory that the 7 years was roughly the age a child (who may have resulted early on from the relationship) would become (relatively) independent so a split in the couple was more likely by that point and this also even applied to childless couples in some evolutionary sense.
It was a fascinating study in human behaviour. I've spent a bit of time on the Traitors reddit and people HATE that series. As I understand Oz has cancelled the show in the wake of it (was before the recent UK & US series blew up so perhaps they might change their minds).
People hate it because it was so frustrating watching the faithfuls fail to spot the obvious - but I'm with you, I think subconsciously they all knew what was going on and were scared and acted on instinctive self preservation. And I also think that's why viewers hated it so much, because it's a deeply uncomfortable truth about human nature and group dynamics. Someone said that it was basically coercive control and I think that's bang on.
I don't actually think Sam played it all that well either, I think it was a combination of intimidation and a certain chance that there weren't enough strong figures at key points to organise against him or speak out at the round table and call out what he was doing - ie: you come for me and I'll take you down.
Psychopaths/sociopaths don't tend to have good models of others' inner lives and motivations and I don't think he did, which is why he blew up at the end when Camille didn't follow the script, even though she had no reason to do as he wished. In an interview afterwards she intimated that there was much more that was cut where he blew up at her, a real narc rage outburst.
Incidentally I thought it was a bit of a cheap trick to introduce the 'Traitor's dilemma' at the end from nowhere. Given there is no way to 'win' a prisoners' dilemma dynamic - if you trust then you're the sucker - then if it was coming then the remaining traitors had to ensure that they manipulated the situation to make sure there were no other traitors left by the end. The ending was inevitable once the producers stepped in.
I would have burned the world down had Sam walked with the money so having him taken down by the fact he was so good at manipulating people seemed like poetic justice - and the fact no one got any money after all of that seemed tragically beautiful in a way. As Auden said, we must love one another or die.
I do think he played 'well', eliminating the competent, his main error being to leave so many other traitors in place at the end. He genuinely seemed to think they'd feel safe to share the money with him. The madness of entitlement.
What I find so interesting about the Traitors is that it holds a mirror to us all. Really the faithful have nothing much to go on when deciding who is a traitor so it brings out all the unconscious bias, predjudices, etc. Sexism, racisim, ageism, etc.
I am neurodivergent and the neurodivergent people on the shows (I've watched a lot - the US, Aus, Norway, and UK) always get banished early. They get voted off because 'somethings not quite right' or 'I just don't trust him, I don't know why'. It has gotten to the point that when they introduce the contestants I can guess how far they will go by their occupation. Software developer? Aerospace engineer? They are mostly voted off episode one or two. It is a sweeping generalisation of course -the UK season 2 had a couple of people who had a whiff of being on the autistic spectrum get quite a long way through.
Yes, people with autistic traits often get picked off because people find them “suspicious” for not making eye contact and so on.
The individual and collective misogyny (and probably homophobia and racism) felt like the big themes of the show. It was also notable that the clever women like Annabelle were banished while the clever men like Luke were murdered. A real lesson for producers in a) don’t have a psychopath as a Traitor b) don’t have a mix of clever/confident people and stupid/unconfident people and end up with only the latter group and a bully c) make sure everyone understands the rules d) call time at the right points in banishment to get rid of the people you need to get rid of for the benefit of a good show like the UK producers do e) it’s not fun to watch a bully and even the catharsis of him getting some comeuppance at the end doesn’t make up for the unpleasantness of the second half of the second half of the series.
The obvious misogyny was WILD. That undercover cop calling Simone “manipulative” for making her case. Jeez.
As an Australian who just discovered all versions of the show (just finished Aus S2 yesterday) I’m sorry it got cancelled however since the first season was so badly edited and the second they let chug along into oblivion (however satisfying the ending was), these are obviously not the producers who should be making the show. Hopefully a reboot can be made by people with a clue (happy to keep Rodger). Sam was repellent (just hate, not love to hate like a good villain) but I admit I did do a lot of screaming at Sarah - how many times can one person talk herself out of the blinding obvious?
Yes, there’s lots of stuff they could have done to up the difficulty gradient for the Traitors. But it was like Heart of Darkness, they’d all gone mad and couldn’t stop
The moment Sam took a glass of bubbly for thousands of dollars and just threw it on the ground for fun was one of the most horrifying moments of TV I've ever seen. The guy is a monster.
Yes! How did that task—and the total lack of team spirit—not come up again. I like to think that’s when Camille thought “you selfish bastards” and made her call on the final.
His £1000 champagne toss also somewhat undermined his jab at her about her throwing away the money at the end because she was rich.
Australian Traitors spoilers! Wasn’t he just the worst most entitled brat. I screamed at the tv for most of the season and then witchy-laughed my way through the closing credits. A terrible show/season overall but some real big emotions in those last 10 minutes ooooeeeee
“Witchy laughed” is a great phrase!
The mention of podcasts/bartlett/huel/thumbnails reminded me of a colleague of mine who found that Huel’s latest Greens product causes, shall we say, explosive digestive responses (essentially D&V every time he tried it, he tried a surprising amount of times)
I was considering sending him every thumbnail permutation of that product that I have seen on YouTube (there are a lot) but wasn’t sure whether that would constitute poor interpersonal skills in the workplace.
Confident this isn’t the sort of response you were looking for when you posted that, but here we are.
I'm thinking you mean Owen Jones or Giles Coren (I'm sure they would be thrilled at the comparison)? The thing that got me Traitors AU2: is how every woman who figured it out was immediately & so easily dismissed. And all the men seemed to stick to believing the Sheriff. The only woman who survives it literally has to nuke the prize from everyone! This is a metaphor right? People were literally afraid of the sheriff but why so much? I'm looking forward to the discussion because I've been thinking about it a lot.
Someone on Reddit said this season was a good way to understand eg Stalinist purges. The theory is that the faithfuls, deep down, knew about Sam but they were scared of him and so gratefully latched on to any reason to vote for someone else.
One thing that’s very noticeable in the tasks is that there’s not much fun being had, or camaraderie on display.
This makes a lot of sense. But why so scared? What was it that he was able to put out there? There is something very, deeply sinister about this series. And also: this is very true about the tasks. I had a feeling they all deeply disliked each other.
He was a big guy — well over 6ft — and clearly an imposing presence. Look at his rage right at the end. I can imagine he was rough to go up against, particularly once people had seen what happened to the last person who tried it.
But it was very interesting that it was always the women who eventually spoke up.
And - I live in Kosovo - see this phenomenon a lot. Of one person with power, always male here, manipulating and using that power to control people. As much as people know & understand what is happening they simply can't bring themselves to call it out for self preservation. Its a toxicity and coldness that envelops everyone. In the UK version you had a less scary guy. But *the* guy. And everyone banded together to stop him even tho it seemed like he was easily going to run away with it all. So there it seems there was more friendliness and willingness to trust each other. That toxicity hadn't settle in. I think the combination of famous & non famous people was an issue as well. It's a bad combo for this game.
This was something we commented on when watching - they didn't really appear to form any friendships or bonds, or at least none that were obvious to the viewer. The completely in your face way that people would just walk up to a group and pull someone away for a private chat, immediately and obviously saying who they wanted to vote out, was so different to the UK version. When the banished claimed "I love you guys!" before departing, I kind of believed them. There were no such claims in the Australian (or American) version!
I think Sam had a strategy of breaking up friendships so the only bonds that remained were with him. He actively created that atmosphere of distrust and unease, and sadly they fluffed their chances at offing him (including the other traitor who turned back from the gates of hell just as he was about to go to war with Satan)
Anyone else watching Traitors, especially the Australian version, think, yeah, i wouldn't last a week if the Tardis took me back to medieval times. The Monty Python holy grail witch trial scene had more logic than the typical banishment vote on Traitors Oz.
In terms of game logic it’s too easy for traitors to select which faithfuls they want to keep for the final rounds.
Remember Mike Reid’ runaround? When contestants could change their answer when they could see how the others had answered? There’s an article somewhere about the traitors and voting systems….Traitors on an alternative vote system anyone :-)
And oh yeah, Australia’s most decorated cop……strewth!
Kemi is great, we need her in Labour
Never heard of Traitor before, very curious to see this Aussie S2 now. I adore depressing revelations about human nature.
Janice Turner as a consummate columnist has that great ability to interview and present a variety of perspectives which I do find occasionally refreshing. That said, Badenoch's comments about her own upbringing and introduction to Britain bears reflection as often articulate new citizens' worldview is shaped far more precisely than the standard PPE route.
Ah Traitors S2, compulsive stuff... I agree it shows an intrinsic limitation of the game that only the traitors can be 100% sure of who's lying or not (cf Mollie not wanting to ditch Harry in case Jas was wrong about him). In the UK version, the producers were happy to throw more curve-balls (eg murder in the open - which did for Miles) to even things up a bit. Overall, the UK version is curated much better, including having contestants who know each irl, which is a much better device than including some random reality celebrities. Shame they've cancelled it, also Rodger was an excellent host.
Rodger really grew on me in S2 with the jokes about his failing career.
From the public intellectual link
“They reign supreme in the public eye for about seven years or so”
There is also the ‘7 year itch’ for relationships
Now I read once that all your cells in your body replace every 7 years, so my thinking is that in a way you are a completely different person today than you were 7 years ago, like an actually physically different new thing
So for the 7 year itch I started to think this isn’t a coincidence and now I have another data point for my (frankly insane) theory
Once read a theory that the 7 years was roughly the age a child (who may have resulted early on from the relationship) would become (relatively) independent so a split in the couple was more likely by that point and this also even applied to childless couples in some evolutionary sense.
Not sure how the cell replacement over 7 years works with kids, might just be adults I think