<\/p>\n
I<\/span>f you have never seen The Traitors<\/a>, you will be sick to death of people telling you to watch The Traitors: everybody loves it, no one can ever explain why. They describe the premise and it\u2019s a load of people lying to one another. Contestants perform challenges \u2013 such as the challenge of running faster than most of them would like \u2013 and then they lie. They are often presented with the dilemma of whether to lie or not, but there is very little suspense, because they always choose lying. That is, of course, if they have anything to lie about; the ones who don\u2019t just operate in a perpetual fog of misdirected trust and reptile-brained paranoia. It sounds like the kind of thing you wouldn\u2019t have to watch twice, but that is so far from true you could easily find yourself scouring the world for the connoisseur\u2019s The Traitors (The Traitors Australia, season two).<\/p>\n Theoretically then, Celebrity<\/a> Traitors, which starts next Wednesday, should be everything you want from TV, supersized. It arrives in a flurry of promises \u2013 the most brutal yet \u2013 with a cast list you couldn\u2019t possibly dislike. Clare Balding, Stephen Fry, Charlotte Church, Celia Imrie, Niko Omilana, Paloma Faith: who wouldn\u2019t want to see them confronting the darkness, or maybe lack of it, at their moral core?<\/p>\n Sadly, no: the introduction of famous people to The Traitors is a misunderstanding of what makes the format work, what makes reality TV work as a whole \u2013 and what makes humans tick. It\u2019s not that these are the wrong celebrities. It\u2019s a well-curated list<\/a>: David Olusoga is very trenchant, Joe Marler, a former rugby player, is sweary \u2013 and there\u2019s no hate figure in there. They\u2019re not making a pantomime, in the I\u2019m a Celebrity \u2026 Get Me Out of Here! style. They have respected the dignity of The Traitors \u2013 and yet still missed the point.<\/p>\n Reality TV works, when it does, on people showing their unvarnished selves \u2013 their desires, flaws, highs and lows \u2013 disclosed without self-consciousness or egotistical display. It is almost impossible to make an authentic account of yourself unless you\u2019re concentrating on something completely different, which is why the most successful concepts come in the form of a competition \u2013 preferably one so engrossing and technical that participants lose all sense of how they are perceived. That\u2019s the genius of Bake Off<\/a>, to imagine a scenario in which the stakes could be simultaneously everything and nothing, in the lap of the gods and the sweating hands of each contestant. Even with the car crashes you can see a mile off, you\u2019re obscurely rooting for them, hoping for a last-ditch salvation that couldn\u2019t possibly arrive, not with that butter-to-sugar ratio. Intense concentration as a means of dissolving artifice, breaking down barriers to reveal the beating heart \u2013 well, how\u2019s that going to work, with a celebrity? Are they really concentrating? Are they acting concentrating? Are they acting a person acting a lie, in order to then act a person acting ashamed to have been caught out in a lie?<\/p>\n Which brings us to the money \u2013 regular Traitors are gunning for 100 grand, and an awesome amount of both their own self-reflection and our investment, as viewers, centres on what they want to do with the money, what bad thing has happened to them in the past that makes them want the money more, what they\u2019re prepared to sacrifice to get the money. All money shows are basically Squid Game<\/a>-lite, a glowing yet sinister fairytale interlude in life\u2019s harsh economic reality. I would never be so naive as to imagine all famous people are rich. Indeed, part of the drama of Celebrity Traitors is the vague awareness that some of them are probably on their uppers and too proud to admit it. But these guys \u2013 yes, even the comedians \u2013 are pledging to give the prize pot to charity, a laudable gesture that absolutely destroys the drama.<\/p>\n You would only make these sacrifices \u2013 of authenticity, of magnetism, of drama \u2013 if you\u2019d bought into the foundational myth that celebrities are inherently more interesting than regular people. It\u2019s a weird mistake for this, of all shows, to make, since the most groundbreaking thing it\u2019s done, culturally \u2013 yes, more novel even than Claudia\u2019s fringe<\/a> \u2013 is to demonstrate that you can care about anyone, even the last four random Australians, with all your heart, as soon as their defences are down.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll probably still watch it though.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.theguardian.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you have never seen The Traitors, you will be sick to death of people telling you to watch The Traitors: everybody loves it, no one can ever explain why. They describe the premise and it\u2019s a load of people lying to one another. Contestants perform challenges \u2013 such as the challenge of running faster […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2330601,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2330600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/The-joy-of-The-Traitors-is-in-rooting-for-real.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2330600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2330600"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2330600\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2330602,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2330600\/revisions\/2330602"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2330601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2330600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2330600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2330600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}