Sometimes a TV show comes along at just the right time. In the feverish early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when we were gasping for human connection, it was Normal People with all its charged adolescent longing and sparse dialogue.
Now there is a newcomer in the emerging category of “TV to watch when you can’t take one more second of anything remotely real”: The Traitors Ireland.
In a world of dire global news, fragmented viewing patterns, AI slop, brainrot, Netflix series that start promisingly and then peter out and a presidential election that has petered out before it started at all, the performance of The Traitors is perhaps not surprising, although it is still extraordinary.
Fifty per cent of the available audience tuned in, and the series has been streamed 3.7 million times on the RTÉ Player. It became that rare thing: event TV that was capable of dragging people away from their individual devices, a show that suggested the demise of popular culture may have been grossly exaggerated. As RTÉ’s Grainne McAleer put it, reaching for the preferred unit of currency of Irish television, it was 12 All-Irelands.
READ MORE
On the surface, it’s not too hard to understand its appeal. This is a show about ordinary people – there are no aspiring OnlyFans stars here; they are estate agents, gardaí, tattoo artists, soldiers - playing a game of strategy that involves breaking the rules of social engagement. It is an adaptation of a Dutch game show that pits a group of secretly appointed “traitors” against a majority group of “faithfuls”.
Because there are two routes to elimination – you’re either voted out by your peers on suspicion of being a traitor or you’re killed off by the real traitors – the outcome is wildly unpredictable. Players who go under the radar episode after episode abruptly surge ahead; narcissists and natural leaders draw too much attention to themselves and get killed off under cover of darkness.
(One of the things that makes it feel so twisty is that, according to the UK Times, it is edited backwards, so the production team starts with the eviction and then goes looking for all the signals that lead up to that point, in much the same way as Agatha Christie wrote her books.)
Part of its appeal is that reality TV built around the exploitation of the participants has begun to feel mean and unhealthy. Contestants are brought in on one premise, but everyone watching knows what it’s really about: we’re here to gape voyeuristically as they descend into a self-destructive death spiral.
The Traitors is different. Conflict – murder, in fact – is the core theme. But it’s more Hercule Poirot than gritty Scandi-noir. Even the conflict feels wholesome because it all happens out in the open. There is no diary room for participants to have a private vent or a snotty weep. The round tables are family therapy sessions with Siobhán McSweeney cast in the role of therapist-slash-school principal.
Of course, there’s no such thing as reality TV that is entirely without manipulation. Any show that reduces participants to a cartoon version of themselves - dastardly garda Eamon; all-seeing Oyin - is guilty of it. But the contract here is less exploitative, partly because there is no public vote. As a result, the participants seem almost unaware there is anyone watching at all; they’re focused only on how they come across to each other. In other reality shows, they parade around in thong bikinis, here they schlep around a draughty Slane Castle wrapped in giant fleece blankets and make one another tea.
But while it bills itself as a giant psychological experiment, I don’t buy that – if anything, it proves that we’re terrible at spotting liars. (Except Oyin. Oyin could spot a liar.) But while you may sneer at the notion that there’s anything remotely scientific about it, that would be to miss the entire point of its appeal.
Ultimately, The Traitors is just very relatable. There is treachery, back-stabbing, manipulation, lying, wheedling, blackmailing, cliques, politics, hubris and long-winded excuses for various perceived infractions that no onlooker can possibly follow. And as they eye each other resentfully around the big table and insist “I’ve been faithful from day one”, you wonder why it all feels so familiar. And then it dawns on you: yes, I’ve been here before. This is every office you’ve ever worked in; every tense family meal you’ve ever suffered through; every messily disintegrating friendship group you’ve ever been part of.
What it also does, as McSweeney astutely observed during the postmortem show (Uncloaked with Kevin McGahern), was make space for the kind of people we don’t see enough of on our screens.
Diane Flaherty, a radio presenter voted out in episode two, was a woman in her mid-50s – and McSweeney’s favourite for this reason – a demographic that barely exists, as far as most popular culture is concerned. Vanessa Ogbonna spent eight years living in a direct provision centre in Tramore, Co Waterford. Sixty-eight-year-old hug-averse Paudie Moloney was everyone’s sweet but slightly embarrassing dad.
They came from every background: working class, middle class, rural, urban, born within and outside Ireland. If other reality TV sometimes leaves you wondering where on earth they find these people, the deceptively brilliant casting here leaves you with the notion you could do a sweep of the queue at Tesco and recruit the entire cast of the second series.
But mostly the reason it struck such a chord is that it felt like the perfect antidote to dark times. At a moment when the world’s bullies, narcissists and sociopaths are in the ascendant, this was a show that rewarded ordinary decency, the ability to find common ground - and, yes, the capacity to tell a convincing lie. I’ve been faithful from day one.
