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\n <\/div>\n\n Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo: Courtesy of the subject<\/span>\n <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div><\/div>\n Stephen Lambert is not being cocky when he says he knew The Traitors was going to be a hit before the first episode aired. The veteran British producer behind the Peacock and BBC versions of the series says his 40-plus years of making television simply made him confident the format would, as he puts it, \u201cpop\u201d with audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. \u201cGenerally in my career, one knows what\u2019s going to be a hit,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n That confidence probably has something to do with the <\/strong>many hits Lambert has overseen since launching his own production company, Studio Lambert, in 2008. In addition to the two versions of The Traitors, Lambert gave Netflix one of its earliest reality breakouts (The Circle) and one of its biggest unscripted smashes (Squid Game: The Challenge). Before that, Undercover Boss and Wife Swap had long runs in both the U.S. and Britain with localized versions around the globe running for years. In the U.K., his r\u00e9sum\u00e9 includes popular titles Gogglebox, Race Around the World, and Faking It.\u00a0<\/p>\n According to Sharon Vuong, the NBC unscripted executive VP who helped bring The Traitors to Peacock<\/a>, Lambert and his team strike gold so often because they are \u201cvery specific about building immersive worlds\u201d in which audiences can get lost \u2014\u00a0think of The Circle\u2019s social-media-inspired set or the shadowy rotunda inside The Traitors\u2019s turret. Plus, she adds, Lambert remains \u201cgranularly involved\u201d when it comes to key details of his productions, particularly casting. \u201cI think he finds it exciting to meet the cast and pick the Traitors himself. He doesn\u2019t want to miss out.\u201d<\/p>\n Studio Lambert\u2019s recent success with event-size unscripted shows has made its services even more in demand among streamers. This year alone, the company has snagged a series order from Prime Video to turn video game Fallout Shelter into a reality competition, won the right to produce Netflix\u2019s upcoming adaptation of Monopoly, and began production on The Mob, a celebrity-packed game of intrigue set up at Hulu. As one of Vulture\u2019s inaugural Reality Masterminds<\/a>, Lambert looks back on The Traitors\u2019s journey to transcontinental phenomenon and his plans to do it again with The Mob at Hulu.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s talk about the origin story for The Traitors. It was a Dutch format first, but how did it get on your radar? How did that translate to you actually making this show with your team? <\/strong> So it never got into any sort of bidding war? It was always thought of as bringing this to the BBC and Peacock?\u00a0<\/strong> The biggest challenge was that the BBC said they wanted to do the show, but in Britain, we have all kinds of government-imposed regulations as to how much programming gets made in different parts of the country. They have to make a certain amount of programming in Scotland, so they said, \u201cWe want to make this show, but you\u2019ve got to make it out of Scotland,\u201d and we said \u201cOkay \u2026\u00a0but I thought we were also going to try and make a version at the same in the same place with NBC?\u201d And they said, \u201cYeah, that sounds good,\u201d and I said, \u201cWell, how are we going to do that because NBC are talking about doing it in an Italian villa?\u201d So we had to persuade NBC that the best place in the world to make this show was midge-infested, freezing-cold Scotland that rains a lot. Which we did, amazingly. And then we all agreed that Alan Cumming would be the perfect host with his Scottish roots. It helped make that Scottish location make real sense for NBC.<\/p>\n Speaking of camp, an executive at NBC told me that going after Alan Cumming was a Studio Lambert idea. Was it yours specifically, or was that someone on your team?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong> What was the adaptation process like working for two buyers at the same time from day one? How did you figure out how to take a format that had done gangbusters in the Netherlands and translate it for these two distinct audiences?\u00a0<\/strong> You ended up taking two very different approaches to casting the Peacock and BBC versions of the show. How did that come about?<\/strong> So we had this slightly odd mixture of some great civilians that we\u2019d found with some celebrities, in the sense that they were people who had acquired fame as a result of being successful on long-running reality shows. When it came to the second season, we leaned into that whole approach. The Peacock version has quite a different sort of celebrity, I would argue, than the BBC celebrities when we decided to do The Celebrity Traitors U.K<\/a>. By that time, the BBC civilian version had become such a big show. And also, there\u2019s a much bigger tradition in Britain, particularly on the BBC, of really very famous people taking part in, well, they\u2019d call them \u201cunscripted\u201d or \u201cfactual\u201d shows. And so you can get people who would be very hard to get in America to take part. In the first season of Celebrity Traitors on the BBC, they were really very famous people.<\/p>\n As the Peacock version became ever more successful, especially after it not only increased its ratings but won the Primetime Emmy for Best Reality Competition two years in a row, everybody started thinking, Well, maybe NBC itself should have a civilian version. It\u2019s a reverse of what we had done on the BBC. I think it makes sense. Going first with civilians in Britain gave us those people who really wanted to win. It made the show very dramatic and enabled us to have this amazing casting for when we did go down the celebrity route. Whereas in America, we probably wouldn\u2019t have built the profile we have if we hadn\u2019t gone down the route of having celebrities. Now that the American show has that profile, it\u2019ll be interesting to have a civilian version. So many successful broadcast shows cast non-celebrities. Why can\u2019t we make this one equally successful?<\/p>\n When did you know Tthe Traitors was a hit in the U.K.?\u00a0<\/strong> Why is casting so key to the success of your shows?<\/strong> We tend to find people who don\u2019t want to be on television. That doesn\u2019t necessarily apply to Peacock\u2019s version of The Traitors, because they\u2019re all people who have made a success of being on television and want to do more, but as a company in general, we want to find people who don\u2019t want to do the show because they\u2019ll be more interesting than the wannabes who want to be on TV.\u00a0One of our most successful shows, the biggest home-grown show on Channel 4 in the U.K., is Gogglebox. We\u2019ve never put a casting call out for that. We\u2019ve gone and found people we think would be interesting and persuaded them to take part. It\u2019s what gives that show, and many other shows that we make, a kind of authenticity.<\/p>\n But with the celeb U.K. and U.S. versions \u2014 they\u2019re both \u201ccelebrities\u201d and yet they feel different from each other. Is it just because one group is reality stars and the others come from so many different kinds of celebrity?\u00a0<\/strong> Was there anything in the U.S. that made you know that it was breaking out here?\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong> Peacock made two great decisions, one going for Love Island and one going for The Traitors. Having two hits is really good because it means the audience knows you can get some high-quality shows on Peacock. They\u2019ll come and find it. Whereas, if one was on one\u2019s own, it might be harder.<\/p>\n How are you approaching episode length for NBC\u2019s civilian version of The Traitors? On broadcast TV here, an hourlong show has about 42 minutes of content in order to squeeze in 18 minutes or so of ads. But the Peacock and BBC episodes all run for at least an hour, sometimes a bit longer.\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong> Generally, we choose where to end the episodes. It\u2019s not as if it\u2019s a format that always ends at the same point in the narrative. And we\u2019re having to be very thoughtful about that with the 42-minute broadcast version for NBC.<\/p>\n So is it definitely going to be 42 minutes an episode?<\/strong> What do you make of all The Traitors\u2019s copycats? Just par for the course?\u00a0<\/strong> Why do you think the show resonates with viewers around the world?<\/strong> Netflix decided it wanted to do a Squid Game show, from what I understand, and you\u2019ve said that you were reluctant to pitch a take on this show at first. How were you finally able to figure out the format?\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong> We had to work out, How are you going to make people care about 456 players? We put a lot of energy into the backstory interviews that we would drop in throughout the show. You got to know somewhere between 20 to 25, maybe 30, and then you were interested in their journey. As producers, we kind of accepted the fact that we might be very involved with someone and suddenly they\u2019re gone. And we\u2019ve now got to somehow switch to all the other people that we\u2019re going to make you interested in. I often thought of Band of Brothers, which was such a brilliant scripted show, because people died when you didn\u2019t expect them to die, yet somehow it managed to cope with that and got you interested in other characters. If you can pull off that trick, which is hard, it can feel very fresh.<\/p>\nReality Masterminds<\/h2>\n
Our inaugural celebration of the most powerful people in unscripted television.<\/h4>\n
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We have a very close relationship with All 3 Media International, who are the distributors for our group and control the rights everywhere. They knew the show had potential. It had launched in Holland and had done pretty well. They got in touch with me and said, \u201cWe\u2019ve got the show, would you like to look at it and would you be interested in taking the American and British rights?\u201d Around the same time, NBC and the BBC both became aware of the show, and they got in touch and said, \u201cOh, we hear that you\u2019ve got the rights, because we\u2019ve spoken to All 3 International. We\u2019re very interested in this show.\u201d It was an unusual situation for a seller, because we had buyers who were knocking on our door as opposed to the other way around.<\/p>\n
We could see that the benefit of doing the two versions in the same location would be great. Missions could be shared, and there were all kinds of cost savings. As a result, we\u2019d be able to deliver more to both parties than we would if we were making them as two separate versions.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t remember who first suggested him, but we all quickly thought that was a good idea. I think we were worried: Would he do it? He was a very established, successful actor, but he\u2019d never taken a host role in an unscripted show. He was a bit unsure initially, but it then clicked with him and he said, \u201cIt\u2019s not me. It\u2019s me playing a role like I do in other acting jobs, this time acting as the lord of this castle running this game.\u201d That made him much more comfortable and gave him a sort of clarity as to what he was doing. He turns out to be extremely good at it. We all secretly hoped he would be able to do it as well as he did, but it was a gamble because he\u2019d never hosted a reality show before.<\/p>\n
We could see that it was a very good format. The fact that we were making the two versions in the same location gave us a much, much bigger budget than the Dutch version. The sense of ambition and scale became possible. We started tweaking a few things. In the first Dutch version, the missions didn\u2019t seem to play into the central narrative of trying to identify the Traitors, so we tried to construct missions that would do that. I\u2019m not sure we got it right the first time, but as the seasons have gone on, we\u2019ve gotten much better at it so that now the missions feel integral. Things happen in the missions that determine who gets banished, the kind of revealing of character in a way that both the original Dutch version and to some extent our original versions didn\u2019t. We also improved the ending. We needed some clever way of bringing the show to a climactic end, so it was this idea that the contestants themselves would decide. If they all voted to not banish, the game would stop.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re very proud of having a reputation for being very good at casting. The BBC were very clear they wanted it to be civilians, people who didn\u2019t have any celebrity profile. They wanted a show where the prize money would matter to people in a big way. Peacock initially took the same view, but then as we got closer to the shoot, there was a sudden wobble and the worry that \u201cOh, God, how are we ever going to get this show noticed?\u201d It\u2019s a much more competitive marketplace in the States, and Peacock is a much smaller relative platform than BBC One is in the U.K. So Peacock said, \u201cActually, we think it would be good to have some celebrity cast.\u201d<\/p>\n
Generally in my career, one knows what\u2019s going to be a hit. It\u2019s when everybody working on the show is buzzing about it. It\u2019s when the people who are editing the final versions hang around and are actually watching the show and caring about it. It\u2019s when the first press people come back and say, \u201cOh my God, this is amazing.\u201d It\u2019s rare that you can\u2019t tell whether something is going to pop by the time you get into the final stages of putting the show together. Having said that, sometimes you\u2019re surprised, and sometimes things don\u2019t do quite as well as you expect, but then they usually build if you have that confidence. Word of mouth will bring people in.<\/p>\n
Well, we don\u2019t have a script and we don\u2019t have writers. All the words that come out of the mouths of our cast are their words. If you pick the wrong people, they\u2019re not going to say very interesting words. So many of these shows are about the cast as a group. You find some that you\u2019re very excited about and then you have to work out who goes with that group. You build it piece by piece or like a house of cards. Sometimes there are great people who come along later and they don\u2019t quite fit.<\/p>\n
A lot of it\u2019s to do with the fact that the people on the Peacock version are American and the people on the BBC version are British. That partly explains the difference to the extent that there is a difference. I mean, The Traitors is a kind of camp show with this gothic setting, with murders and banishments and treachery, so it encourages people to be larger than life and somewhat extravagant in the way in which they behave. And I think that that possibly comes more naturally to Americans, particularly Americans who\u2019ve achieved fame as a result of being in Housewives shows on Bravo or the competition shows to some extent. Whereas Celia Imrie, a famous British actress \u2014 she\u2019s more used to playing in Hamlet rather than in reality shows. A lot of the people in our British celebrity version had never taken part in a reality show. That\u2019s an immediate difference.<\/p>\n
It was the press getting behind it quite quickly. Peacock\u2019s decision to do an early batch release of a few episodes and then weekly, and you started hearing about people having weekly watch parties \u2014 that was obviously very encouraging. And again, there was equal buzz among everybody involved in making the U.S. version.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re thinking about how much you squeeze into a particular episode and whether some stuff can exist over more than one episode. The BBC versions are 60 full minutes, no ad breaks, and often the BBC give us extensions beyond 60 minutes. But with American broadcast networks you might jump to 90 minutes in some cases or have two episodes back-to-back. But your running time in an hour is short \u2014 42 minutes.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re still talking to NBC about it. I\u2019m not saying they\u2019re not sympathetic or appreciative of this problem. What I\u2019m saying is that we\u2019re acutely aware, particularly when there\u2019s been so much success with this civilian version in Britain and elsewhere, where the running times of the episodes has been at least 60 minutes.<\/p>\n
Obviously, imitation is the highest form of flattery, but I wouldn\u2019t call them copycats myself because they\u2019re not copies. There obviously comes a time when a particular show becomes something of a paradigm for what people are enjoying and talking about. And when that happens, it has an impact on both people pitching ideas and people buying them. I mean, there definitely was a copycat when we launched Wife Swap on ABC and Fox raced in with Trading Spouses. That was a copycat show. I\u2019m not sure these other ones are quite as clear-cut as that.<\/p>\n
Viewers love the fact that they\u2019re watching people playing a game. They have the pleasure of the dramatic irony of knowing who the Traitors are, and they find it very enjoyable watching the Faithful be so certain and yet often so wrong. That process of observing people construct theories about how the world is with such confidence and then presenting that is intrinsically entertaining. I think the players like it because the Traitors are given license to lie. Often a reality show is designed in such a way that certain characters behave badly and that tends to be perceived as a reflection of their real character. That can leave you, as a viewer, with a slightly bad taste, and it certainly can make the player who ends up being seen that way feel not great about it. Whereas The Traitors is like a game of poker. Nobody says, \u201cOh, you\u2019ve just been lying.\u201d They say, \u201cWell done. You played brilliantly as a Traitor.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brandon Riegg<\/a> at Netflix talked to a handful of companies, and everybody\u2019s reluctance \u2014 both ours as producers and his as head of unscripted \u2014 was about the fact that this Korean drama had become such an enormous show for Netflix\u00a0\u2014\u00a0their biggest show. On the one hand, it invited an unscripted version to be made since it was a scripted show about a game. But on the other hand, screw it up and you could end up damaging their most precious show. That was the tension.<\/p>\n