3 hours ago
7
That’s it then. The curiously pristine SUVs are back in the garage, the cloaks are off to the dry cleaners and your favourite hits of the 80s and 90s are safe, for a few months at least, from those absurdly melodramatic cover treatments. Yes, The Celebrity Traitors is over, having served up a finale that had just the right amount of intrigue, double-crossing and slack-jawed looks to camera from the terminally outwitted. We won’t ruin things here for anyone who hasn’t watched it yet, but for a full spoiler-filled debrief you can read Lucy Mangan’s review of last night’s drama here.
It was a fitting capstone to a remarkably successful first Celebrity Traitors outing. Fears that its big names might be too media-trained or overly deferential to one another – or just lacking the ruthlessness and desperation of their civilian equivalents, who actually need the win a fair bit more than the celebs do – proved unfounded. The show’s core appeal was still there, but in a supersized state. The casting managed to be preposterously starry – featuring at least half a dozen people who wouldn’t usually go within a 10-mile radius of a reality TV show – but also carefully consistent with the civvy edition’s usual mix of personality types. More broadly, the Traitors franchise is now in its imperial phase; a ratings hit in a post-ratings era, a format that it feels like everyone is watching and talking about, even if they’re not.
But here we should probably insert a warning from history – history in this case meaning “two days ago on Channel 4”. Did you know that The Great British Bake Off crowned its 16th winner on Tuesday? If you didn’t, you can hardly be accused of living under a rock. There was barely an echo of the breathless, news-alert coverage that the series used to attract, and overnight ratings for this current bun run have been the lowest since its move to Channel 4 (and the lowest altogether since those early experimental series on the BBC with those infuriating cutaway segments on the history of suet pudding or whatnot).
I don’t mean to have a dig at a redoubtable reality institution that, having launched just after the coalition government was formed, is now on its sixth prime minister. Bake Off is clearly still valued by Channel 4; those ratings, though low by the show’s standards, tower over the rest of the network’s output. But it does illustrate how perilously quickly a reality franchise can fade from view. Reality TV has a raw deal in this sense. With most scripted series (excluding soaps or procedurals like CSI) a limited shelf life is baked in, even encouraged. Reality TV, though, is expected to continue indefinitely – and then we inevitably lose interest in it, often due more to overfamiliarity than any major fault of its makers. Think of any reality format – the traffic-stopping, thinkpiece-prompting sensation that was Love Island, say – and it’s probably experienced a similar boom and bust. (I’m a Celebrity … and Strictly are curious exceptions – though the sheen seems to be coming off the latter.) All that can be done is to keep those boom times going a little longer, season by season.
It’s certainly boom time for The Traitors, but the pitfalls are obvious. The episodes’ daily table-murder structure is vulnerable to feeling repetitive. The usual response to that fear from producers would be to introduce twists or MacGuffins – last season’s Seer power would be an example of the latter – which has the risk of making the series feel overly engineered or manipulated. And there’s the danger of contestants getting a little too familiar with how the game is played – though actually that has been a benefit to the celebrity series, with Jonathan Ross using his knowledge of the show’s many international formats to inform his Traitorly behaviour.
But the biggest threat to the Traitors franchise is surely overexposure. Buried at the end of last night’s finale was an atmospheric, though essentially information-free, trail for the regular, original-flavour Traitors, coming soon on BBC One. It’s unclear how soon, but going by previous years it should be back as soon as the start of January. That’s an awful lot of Traitors in a short time for a show that had previously only occupied three nights a week for two months once a year. Other shows have doubled up and paid the price. Will viewers happily readjust to civvy Traitors, or will it feel underwhelming with the memory of Alan Carr and the other hyper-charismatic celeb traitors and faithfuls still fresh?
These are good problems to have though, and producers Studio Lambert have talented people on staff to solve them. Season four of the series proper was filmed just a few months after the celebrity edition and no doubt was being constructed and tweaked with its celeb forerunner in mind. New ways of keeping an old game fresh will have been devised. And, most importantly of all, there will always be people, famous or otherwise, ready to make fascinating, maddening, completely engrossing decisions across a big, round table.
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