I recognize that the Traitors that I have seen is not the one of the majority of the spectators. I have personally dealt with quite a few of the contestants on the HBO Max reality show. Some I even know well. However, I talk to people who don’t even know who those people who live in a castle are and they are also inside Traitors. What’s more: I’m not one to brag about knowing celebrities, but I neither confirm nor deny having boasted of having the phone number of some faithful… and some traitor.
The protagonists of this Dutch format are divided into these two categories, which, after succeeding in other countries, has finally arrived in Spain. It has done it in a somewhat strange way, with HBO Max publishing all its episodes at the same time. This encourages binge consumption, but on the other hand, a golden opportunity is lost for the conversation about Traitors Spain to last for a couple of hours. months.
Hosted by Sergio Peris Mencheta in the perfect tone (solemn without being parodic, playful without being a clown), Traitors is a television version of games like The Town Sleeps, in which each player knows which team they belong to (faithful or traitors). but ignores the affiliation of the other players. So your job is to suspect everyone and at the same time avoid being suspected by others, who will be able to eliminate you by popular vote at the end of each day. At night, every day too, the faithful chosen by the traitors will be eliminated. Thus, little by little, the number of participants in the game decreases, the group dynamics become more sophisticated and the atmosphere becomes rarer. Anyone who has played Werewolves of Castronegro or the wicked Two Rooms and a Boom knows how unhinged a few simple cards can be to a group of adults. A hilarious and addictive madness, by the way.
Traitors generates these sensations both in its participants and in its spectators. Throughout its eight episodes, the magic of good reality shows takes place: you start off stunned by the number of characters you have to digest and before you know it you already have them all soaked through. And then comes a surprise… and then another. Some of the most exciting moments on television in recent months belong to Traitors: from the heartbreaking “I’m not such a good actress” by Sandra Escacena to an ending that I won’t reveal but, indeed, how did you not see it coming, Alberto.
Before Telecinco monopolized this type of program in Spain, the recorded and (well) edited reality shows gave us magnificent plots, moments of genuine emotion and unbeatable characters: from Francesca from Survivors to Gonzalo from Masterchef. Villains built by editing and post-recording script that showed that television is the kingdom of complex characters and developed over time. I don’t want any more debates about Big Brother or live connections with the palapa. I want more Traitors.
Narratives are often divided between plot driven and character driven. That is, stories centered on the plot or on the characters. Luckily Traitors is one of the latter, because if the program trusted everything to us to understand its script twists well, we would be fine. I would have loved to better understand how reality shows work. Or that he cared more about explaining it to me, especially if he is going to make changes in the middle of the season. I don’t know if their participants were less pro-gaming than they should be or just the opposite. I do know that the result has been that listening to them and getting to know them is as fascinating as it is frustrating trying to follow their strategies as players. Especially from the moment two perfect archetypes come out of the board: the natural villain and the quintessential faithful one (do we need to say names?). That’s where Traitors sets himself up.
Eliminating two easy-to-understand characters from the narrative, the story ends up resembling that phrase from Diario, Chuck Palahniuk’s extraordinary novel: “What you don’t understand can mean what you want.” This is how I have lived many sections of Traitors. Even some of the episodic tests that the contestants went through to get advantages in the game ended up turning into an unnecessary and anticlimactic “this is just like that”. Good thing you have these magnetic characters trapped between three dwindling walls: who they are, who they want to be, and who the show wants them to be. Between the extreme (and suicidal) frontality of Paula Púa and the mystery of Apolonia Lapiedra there is a huge range of roles. Also between Cristina Cifuentes, who assumes, like a defeated Coetzee character, a public image that she was unable to control, and Rubén Ochandiano, who lives each moment as if it were his last. What they are is interesting, even if what they do is sometimes confusing.
Perhaps this confusion is the fault of Traitors, which has not known how to reconcile characters and plot. Trying to be an exciting plot driven story, the HBO Max format has given us a character driven tableau in which we prefer to see its characters talking about themselves than about the game they have accessed. Compared to the editions of other countries, the Spanish version of Traitors is more chaotic and unpredictable… for worse. It has, yes, an unbeatable casting job. The sadness that some of their expulsions have produced in me has a very clear explanation: I wanted to know more about these people, I wanted to marvel at the unlikely connections that can occur between humans who otherwise would never have rowed to the same place. It’s a TV show, I know; It is a work made of assembly, editing, lies and manipulation, I am fully aware. But I believe the faithful and the traitors of Traitors and I love them. I wish the mechanics of the series had absorbed me with equal intensity. I did enough learning how it works. Or thinking that he did.
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