by MCICMMarch 17, 20255:54 pm

The Game That Broke ‘The Traitors’

The bottle and lid don’t fit. It could be the bottle’s fault or the lid’s fault. In either case, there’s no denying that the fit is bad.

(Spoilers for series 3 of The Traitors UK!)

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Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
0:22 Television
15:34 Reality
27:49 Conclusion

Links/sources:

Journal articles:
Guy Redden, ‘Is Reality TV Neoliberal?’, Television & New Media, 19(5), 2017.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/31967180_Is_Reality_TV_Neoliberal
Aiden James Kosciesza, ‘”It’s Do Or Die”, Cultural Labor, Competitive Reality TV, and the Reproduction of Neoliberal Capitalism’, International Journal of Communication 15, 2021.
https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/viewFile/16927/3404#:~:text=This%20article%20argues%20that%20creative,conditions%20of%20the%20cultural%20workforce
Jérôme Bourdon, Self-Despotism: Reality Television and the New Subject of Politics, Framework 49(1), 2008.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41552512

Web articles:
‘The Traitors fans fed up with ‘boring’ part of BBC show’ by Julia Hunt for Yahoo.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/the-traitors-boring-bbc-221821708.html#:~:text=The%20Traitors%20viewers%20have%20slammed,their%20own%20identities%20a%20secret.
‘The Traitors US & UK Challenges Are Boring & Need To Make This Major Change, According To Fans’ by Jeff Dodge for Screen Rant
https://screenrant.com/the-traitors-us-uk-boring-challenges-fan-reactions/

‘Why does the Pentagon give a helping hand to films like ‘Top Gun’?’ by Roger Stahl for the LA Times: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-05-30/top-gun-maverick-memorial-day-tom-cruise-pentagon-propaganda
‘Without Writers, TV Junkies Confront New Realities’ by Kim Masters for NPR: https://www.npr.org/2007/12/12/17178553/without-writers-tv-junkies-confront-new-realities
‘Werewolf: How a parlour game became a tech phenomenon’ by Margaret Robertson for WIRED: https://www.wired.com/story/werewolf/

Books:
Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, After the Future, AK Press, 2011 (trans. Arianna Bove, Melinda Cooper, Erik Empson, Enrico, Giuseppina Mecchia, and Tiziana Terranova)
Read: https://www.are.na/block/633024
Fulford, Tim, Landscape, Liberty and Authority, Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Description topline is from 1Q84 (Books One and Two) by Haruki Murakami. Trans. Jay Rubin, Vintage. P152.

And thank you to @NothingButMediaNBM, @LordRavenscraft, @DanielGoldhorn and @NandovMovies for their voice lines here (as well as the PoG Discord server Among Us participants!)

I’d also like to thank YouTube Member Alex O’Connor who joined up after this video (and its credits) were already locked & loaded.

source

25Comments

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1

@PillarofGarbage on March 17, 2025 at 5:54 pm
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hey! if you fancy helping me make more stuff like this (and also get bonus videos and extra perks) why not take a look over here? https://www.patreon.com/c/pillarofgarbage
2

@TheoreticalString on March 17, 2025 at 5:54 pm
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They're so bad at mafia. Someone lied, stole, and betrayed all to get immunity from the night kill? Guess what, they're not deciding who gets killed at night. If you're deciding who dies at night, why would you care that much?
3

@xoeleox2079 on March 17, 2025 at 5:54 pm
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1:55 It would certainly reduce the gravitas of the game somewhat if the contestants talked about "this is like Among Us" or "this is like Mafia" or "this is like Town of Salem" or "this is like Blood on the Clocktower" or whatever other game this game is like. It just doesn't sound as nice to say "you got the budget to do Among Us in a Scottish castle" than whatever the description the show actually has for itself.

For whatever reason, television series seem to invest heavily in the idea that TV audiences will believe a program is novel? As in, they often seem to assume you have no idea what an amogus is, for instance.
4

@marlowemichaelson1366 on March 17, 2025 at 5:54 pm
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The problem is also that challenges would be more rewarding if they were physically oriented like survivor or big brother. But because the cast is so diverse (age, weight, fitness or lack of), the challenges have to be EASY enough for eveyone to do.

UK Season 1, i like Meryl and Hannah but they did nearly nothing other than being well liked, they hardly picked up the slack in challenges. Same with Delores in US 3. So they got rewarded with the win just by skating by and not using skill.

There is no incentive to make the challenges more engaging to watch because they would have to be much more deliberate with choosing players who can DO physical stuff.
5

@P1THY-ow on March 17, 2025 at 5:54 pm
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In the last season of french traitors, the whole table voted off a cop because he was insufferable.

The guy had watlzed in and decided two people were traitors based on a coincidence and didn't move on. He used his over inflated cop ego to justify his continued attacks on these people up until the point where people had enough. They all knew he wasn't a traitor, they just didn't like him and felt he was jeopardising the faithful.
6

@MoonGalleon22 on March 17, 2025 at 5:54 pm
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I think this is a great analysis, but as a Traitors fan who's listened to a lot of the behind the scenes podcast, "Traitors Uncloaked", I do think there are parts of the context that are missing: namely, that Dan is an autistic man who wanted to resist the social pressure of having to play the game a certain way; and everyone in that castle was already playing the game very indiviualisticly due to getting paranoid as all hell.
Dan explained in the podcast that his strategy was partly reliant on the idea that it didn't actually matter who gooped who, that no one was going to confess to the people they gooped that it was them who did it, and that, gameplay-wise, it could only benefit the Faithfuls for everyone to stay quiet about it; if Mina was a faithful then she would surely understand why he did it, and if she was a Traitor then it'd effect her gameplay to think that people might be on to her. He generally seemed to feel that the game itself was hypocritical and full of group-think, where people act in their own self-interest constantly and then start chanting in unison about teamwork; Dan's claim was that he was just being honest about that.
And people WERE very self-interested that series, because two things happened in episodes 1 and 2: firstly, the mission on the train where three people were chucked out in exchange for money, and secondly, Keith – the one guy that everyone really liked – got murdered. This set up a dynamic where people were way more interested in staying in the game at all costs, even if it meant less money in the prize pot – they trusted each other a lot less, were more likely to scrutinise their close friends, and were all really hungry for shields. In-jokes from Uncloaked highlighted how literally anything you could say or do would get you marked as a Traitor (remember poor Kasim, who was hounded for having a "twinkle in his eye"? Or Alexander, who got voted back on because he's a diplomat, and then had suspicion thrown on him because he was too calm in high-stress situations?), and how a recurrent sentence was "Why am I still here", as players assumed they must have a friend who's a Traitor that is keeping them in the game for their own reasons.
This carried through to the finale, where the Faithful won, but two Faithful were banished needlessly (as in, they'd already got all the Traitors out) because nobody trusted each other; if everyone who got voted off in the finale had actually been a Traitor, then that series would have had like 9 Traitors in total and the final party would have been made up almost entirely of Traitors. Alexander even compared it to The Prisoners Dilemma, where it benefits everyone the most to cooperate, but the trust to do so wasn't there. At the end of the day, a lot of people played the game in a way that only benefitted the Traitors team: throwing suspicion onto random people for benign things, while protecting any friends that they suspected of being Traitors in the hopes that staying close to that person would keep them in the game longer.
I guess my conclusion was that it wasn't just Dan who was like this – he was just the one guy who was most up-front about playing the game this way.
(Also a fun fact: apparently, he was one of three people who lied about what his job was. He told people that his day-job was Author, because he'd just published a book.)
7

@Danny_V272 on March 17, 2025 at 5:54 pm
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20:17 that’s nandovmovies if I’ve ever heard him
8

@cliveadams7629 on March 17, 2025 at 5:54 pm
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What's neo liberalism when it's at home?
9

@cliveadams7629 on March 17, 2025 at 5:54 pm
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I did watch the last few episodes of Traitors just to see how it could end. It wasn't that engrossing.
10

@RowanPrice-p6o on March 17, 2025 at 5:54 pm
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I have been obsessed with this show, so glad to see a video on it!!
11

@alexcoyg3281 on March 17, 2025 at 5:54 pm
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I used to love playing Mafia in school in Russia, in our Psychology class, it was hands down the best and most entertaining educational game I experienced in a school environment. It gave me incredible insight into people's ability to manipulate both with body language and spoken word, there was no other experience of such kind in my life before hand. I think this show is great because it combines many levels of complexities of human behavioir, I am a big fan. Although i still think that "Couples Therapy" on showtime is handsdown The Best Reality show that everyone in a relationship has to watch, right now, "Traitors" is a solid #2 for me.
12

@ShadowMewto on March 17, 2025 at 5:54 pm
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LETS FUCKING GO NANDO V MOVIES CAMEO
13

@camipco on March 17, 2025 at 5:54 pm
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You don't mention the racial politics here in the first part, I wonder if the show does. Minah's concern about her hair is related to her identity as a black woman and comes with all the weight of how black women's hair has been the subject of racist attack for centuries and is a site where black women have through intense effort been able to exercise some degree of control, pride and identity in face of those attacks. In short, having good hair is armor against racism for black women. So for two white 'friends' to dump sure-looks-like-tar on her hair after her explicitly expressing how horrifying that idea was to her, and lie to her about it is a betrayal with a whole deeper level than the white contestants might even have been aware of, but I'm confident was on Minah's mind.
14

@bobtheskutterbot on March 17, 2025 at 5:54 pm
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Just wondering what we can tell from the US Traitors in how different the society is… it's somewhat overly skewed by the fact that they have people who have celebrity as their career but it also seems to be played more straight-up, as Dan would play it. Perhaps it reflects the more capitalist and individualistic nature of the people in the US more than it does the choices of the production…
15

@pf9878 on March 17, 2025 at 5:54 pm
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i've never seen any videos on traitors vefore and i am all for this let's go
16

@NYKIKE on March 17, 2025 at 5:54 pm
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Cinema
17

@electonicalli4804 on March 17, 2025 at 5:54 pm
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I feel like your quote integration may need some work. While you do effectively lead into them, the difference in prose is often jarring. While it is nice to quote relevant sources, i feel like the direct quotation style also doesnt necessarily improve the quality of the video as you dont contextualize the quotation itself or within your argument. If you dont want to break the flow of the video by providing a specific link to your argument or idea, you would likely be better off providing a paraphrased rendition of what the article actually says so you can bake in whatever reference to your arguement you think it makes. The links the quotes make to what your ideas would also be more clear with more effective signposting of what you actually want to talk about instead of examining quotations to eventually reveal an idea later. I think this would also help bridge the stylistic gap between the sections if the video
18

@HarryPrice-i1v on March 17, 2025 at 5:54 pm
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Traitor!
19

@24thGreekLetter on March 17, 2025 at 5:54 pm
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Holy shit among us
20

@edspace. on March 17, 2025 at 5:54 pm
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I still get one defensive argument for Neoliberalism; "If we don't have this system of leaving everything to markets then history has shown that people will turn on each other, from the Peasants War to the Thirty Years War to the World Wars to the Cold War to the Culture War, if we don't let the market decide things then the ideologies will take over and either take power and like your ancestors in Mexico [I'm part Spanish but maybe they got mixed up] keep sacrificing ordinary people so that one day the sun will rise on their utopia or no ideology will be able to take over and it will be like 1618 all over again." while I was born in Britain in 1993 some of my relatives remember Franco, Ngeuma and other family histories of religious/political persecution.
So I wonder is there an alternative to Neoliberalism and Authoritarianism?
21

@eveofthewood on March 17, 2025 at 5:54 pm
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For me, I saw the premise and was like, "oh, it's Secret Hitler" (board game)
22

@mikh172 on March 17, 2025 at 5:54 pm
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what's the track that plays in the beginning of the reality segment?: couldn't find it in the desc
23

@alecchristiaen4856 on March 17, 2025 at 5:54 pm
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Another stroke of genius in this task was to pair up the contestants to goop someone.

On your own, you can do as you please. In pairs, not only do you gotta work with and convince your partner, but also keep in mind that as much as you lie, they will know what happened.
24

@mathewperring on March 17, 2025 at 5:54 pm
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I just want to thank you for making such a ln interesting video that has cut through all the daily insanity.
25

@DilutedH2SO4 on March 17, 2025 at 5:54 pm
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Minah should’ve won fr