Traitors: New Blood’s biggest problem

NBC’s The Traitors: New Blood has been a baffling mess, and I think there’s one thing to blame more than anything else: episodes that are much shorter than the ones on Peacock. Yep, I’m blaming the editing!

Transcript

Players It’s time to find out if the editing of The Traitor’s New Blood is a traitor or a faithful, and if I can continue a Scottish accent For more than one word.
Welcome to Made from Humans: How Reality Becomes TV.
I’m your host, Andy Dehnart.
The creator of Reality Blurred and a writer who believes in the power of true stories.
The Traitors US is in the middle of its first civilian season, and it’s not going too well.
But I think the players and the game are the victims of some treachery.
That’s not actually their fault.
Welcome!
Thank you for joining me in this discussion of the Traitors.
Before we get there, I’m going to start with what’s coming, where I look ahead at future coverage.
I’m going to be writing about the return of the original Real Housewives of New York cast members, or some of them, on Ease the Golden Life. which is coming Tuesday, October 20th, in the evening.
And I’m going to be writing about that because The Real Housewives of New York City, which features none of those people, of course. is actually extremely good all of a sudden after a couple years of being completely dismal.
So it’s wild that we’re getting the original cast members back right as the Show itself has found new legs and new levels of absurd and hilarious drama.
So, writing about that, that’s coming up I’m also going to be writing tomorrow, Wednesday, October 21st, about a new Netflix show that’s dropping that day called The New Stanford Prison Experiment.
Yes, Netflix is redoing the experiment that at Stanford led to the creation of ethical guidelines to prevent experiments like it from being done again in the future.
So why did Netflix think that this was a good idea?
We’ll discuss that in my review, but we can look for that tomorrow, and also look for future Netflix shows like the New Hindenburg disaster, and the new Titanic.
What does happen when we put people on a boat and smash it into an iceberg in the middle of the North Atlantic in the winter and and give them only doors to float on?
Can’t wait to see the results of that.
Okay, on to accept the edit, where I consider the role a show ‘s editing is playing in our perception of the events.
Now, this is a new department, but a long-standing thing in reality TV.
Since the real world days, I remember people talking about or complaining about the editing.
As being something that had misrepresented, at the very least, what they did, said, or experienced I just want to acknowledge that for the people who are turned into reality TV, the editing is the major piece of machinery.
It’s like you feed the, you know.
Ground beef in one side and it squeezes out.
Okay, that’s about.
I’m gonna drop that metaphor.
It’s like you put the dough in one side and like pasta comes out the other side, like machine sort of thing.
I think I’m thinking of that machine from you can’t do that on television at the beginning, the children’s television sausage factory.
Was that what it was called?
Anyway.
The idea is that you take a series of events and then you have to condense it and turn it into a story, and that is not going to reflect the reality that anyone experiences.
Imagine someone filmed you so far today and edited that down into five minutes of the most interesting moments, whatever those are.
Those.
That like little clip would not reflect what you would experience because it would be missing context.
It would be missing all of the just the time that elapsed.
It would be missing.
You know, the things that were not so interesting and were kind of boring, but maybe balanced out those bigger moments.
And that’s, at the very least, what happens to reality TV cast members.
But there’s so much more that happens, and we will discuss that in this department in the future, where we look at like the role of story editors and all kinds of other things in turning events into television.
Today, I want to think about time especially, and time in terms of the Traitors’ New Blood.
As I mentioned, we had the first U.
S. civilian season of The Traitors.
Airing right now on NBC.
A couple of things about this are different.
One, we’ve been wanting or people have been asking for a all Civilian season, meaning not reality TV star version of the Traitors U.
S. since the beginning.
Now, the first season had half new people and half reality stars, and then from then on they just went all reality stars.
I do love that format.
I love watching Survivor players and big brother players and have to face off against housewives and try to figure their way through.
Relationships and strategy, but I also understand the criticisms there.
And I love the Traitors UK, which has an all -civilian cast every season and the same challenges and structure generally.
As the celebrity season in the US.
So it’s an interesting thing to compare back and forth.
So I’m grateful for all Traitors because I love the show in general.
And That’s a.
I’m glad we have this civilian season to see brand new people play the game.
One major change that NBC Universal made was putting this on NBC.
The major goal of putting the Traitors on NBC seems to have been to try to draw more people into the Traitors world.
Those who are left watching broadcast TV and may have not experienced or been exposed to the Traitors on Peacock now see it on NBC.
My version of experiencing that in terms of social media conversation and just people who watch the Traitors has been confusion because they expect the Traitors to be on Peacock.
And suddenly it was on NBC and not streaming on Peacock at the same time it premiered.
It was that waiting till it was on the next day.
So new episodes Thursdays on NBC.
Peacock on Fridays.
I don’t think that’s that big of a deal.
And I understand the idea of putting it on broadcast to try to bring people over to the streaming service that they need people to pay for because no one watched was broadcast now that everyone got screwed over by following in Netflix’s Foot or steps, and that’s a totally different conversation.
So I’ll avoid that tangent for right now.
From the very beginning, this season has been weird.
And I don’t know exactly if it’s one thing, but I’m going to blame one thing because I think it is due to one thing, which I will work our way into.
We have Alan coming back.
He’s amazing, doing his thing, his costumes, all that’s fantastic.
The castle, the editing, in terms of its like dramatic presentation, the music, the Torches, all of those things are as expected on the Traitors.
The players are a really great mix of people and interesting.
Terms of the way they’re approaching the game and each other.
And of course, none of them know each other.
There was some complaint from the fan base that a lot of them had Big followings online or were quote unquote influencers.
I don’t think many, if any, are actual quote unquote influencers.
Alone.
Like, I think of that as somebody who does nothing and excepts sort of puts themselves on social media.
These are people who have social media presences for their work or They have careers that have gotten them attention, and I think that’s perfectly fine.
And they’re big personalities, which is what you need on the Traitors for the most part.
There’s some curious choices that I don’t quite understand.
Like the production fired Fergus, the groundskeeper, who was played by an actor and Basically, it gave a lot of sort of character and life to these kind of like interstitial scenes around the game, which I really loved.
They got rid of him, and now we have the Weasley Brothers, or whatever their actual names are.
I should be grateful that they’re doing a show that doesn’t give JK some more money so she can go sit in her castle and target trans people.
I don’t know why they’re there, although I guess maybe people might have wondered that about Fergus as well.
Excuse me, Fergus, I guess.
Okay, my Scottish accent is terrible.
I will not attempt that again in this episode.
Apologies.
When the show kicked off, we had two episodes back-to-back, and then we had another two episodes back-to-back.
And the thing that Really screwed the show early, I think, is that number one, those first episodes went up against Big Brother and got absolutely slaughtered in real time Ratings.
Now, of course, people watch on Peacock, people watch on DVR.
But if you were a reality TV fan, turning into actual broadcast TV On the Thursday night when Trader’s New Blood premiered, you were probably watching Big Brother live because it was a live eviction, etc. etc.
Then the Traitors took two weeks to get to its next episode.
So we went from a cliffhanger in episode four to a Resolution of that cliffhanger two weeks later.
And the worst thing about that was that fifth episode was, I wrote this repeatedly. a pamphlet of an episode at best, there was nothing there, and they just kind of like stretched out this dramatic Sequence at the end to find out which of the players had been eliminated by the Traitors, and then cliffhung that until episode six.
Which is, as of this taping, as many episodes as I’ve seen.
So, spoiler alert if you are not caught up to episode six, I will be discussing some of the things that happened in episode six in moments.
So I think that schedule just really couldn’t have helped.
People who are just watching on Peacock even are maybe going and looking for new episodes and they’re not there.
Or you get two and then two and then nothing for two weeks, and then this like weird episode, and then now we’re back to kind of normal episodes, thankfully.
But that was a bad call on whoever scheduled this.
That did not help the show.
But I think the big problem is that the episodes are 42 minutes long.
That is the standard length for broadcast television with commercials.
So we have like 18 minutes of commercials in every hour.
So we get a 42-minute show.
The reason I think that that’s a problem is because season four of The Traitors, which is the last season of the celebrity US Traitors, for some reason they’re calling this the Traitors New Blood and season five.
Anyway, so season five is what’s airing right now with the new people.
Season four, which aired on Peacock earlier this year, those episodes were between 60 and 70 minutes each.
So we are talking about twenty to thirty minutes less every episode.
That’s what we’re going from.
And that’s Huge.
Like 20 to 30 minutes without commercials in terms of actual content.
So 42 minutes of content to 60 to 70 minutes of content.
I don’t want to pretend that it’s easy to condense a show into 60 or 70 minutes, never mind 42.
So I really feel for the people who are doing this work of pulling all of this together into story.
But I think. stuff is go being left out, and that is making the experience of watching it not as great as it could be.
Perhaps this is true of the Solarby version as well, and we just don’t see it as clearly as we are right now.
The most clear example, and this is a major spoiler for episode six.
Is that what happened at the round table and before the round table didn’t make any sense to us as viewers?
Because it seemed like everyone was acting completely absurd.
So the Traitors were given a task of murdering in plain sight, which means they must choose a player to eliminate and do something while all the other players are just Walking around having dinner, having conversations, whatever.
It makes the Traitors’ job really hard in the game.
I really like it for that reason.
These murders in plain sight.
This one required the Traitors to take an apple and throw it to the player they wanted to eliminate.
Whoever caught the apple would be the person eliminated from the game, or in the trader’s term, murdered.
Murdered.
Am I getting any better?
I don’t know.
I think I promised to not do that.
Apologies again.
So, uh , we saw Joe walk around the castle with an apple.
Throw it at someone who didn’t catch it and let it roll next to her on the couch, and then do that again.
We saw him like Tossing it around and juggling it.
We saw Tamika asking people if they wanted an apple in the kitchen.
There was like all this stuff that felt super suspicious.
And of course, we’re seeing a version where we know who the traitors are and we know what their task is.
So we have more information than all of the faithful do.
At the same time, those things were so obvious and so big that when they got to the round table and Victor, who had basically figured this out, that a murder in plain sight was happening and that it involved Fruit.
Like, he didn’t get that catch the apple part, but he basically was like, oh my gosh, this is what they’re doing.
And the Traitors are Tamica and Joe.
Like he you figured out the game, which is incredible to watch because there’s so few occasions where people are making decisions based on actual evidence in the Traitors.
And yet he was completely dismissed.
And he was, they just, people did not buy his argument at all.
Instead, they voted out Michael.
Now, Michael, in his exit interviews, has been surprisingly hostile about this whole thing.
Like he’s mad that people didn’t.
Call him on the phone to tell him why they were lying to him in a game about lying.
But the most interesting thing he said in all of his exit interviews is that when Victor brought this up at the round table, the theory about the murder in plain sight.
He, Michael, was among the people who dismissed it immediately because another player, Clyde, has an allergy to fruit.
And Michael’s argument was, of course, they’re not going to choose a food-related task as a murder in plain sight because They can’t involve that wouldn’t be able to involve Clyde, and that would not be fair.
And so I think they were also comparing it to, like, are they going to, you know, there’s people who are vegetarians.
Is the task going to be like eating some meat?
Or if they’re gluten-free, they have to, like.
Rub some bread on their face.
I don’t know.
I’m making this part up.
But the essential idea was that the players wrote this off because it made sense to them that the producers would not choose something.
Involving another player’s allergy.
I don’t know the details of Clyde’s allergy.
I am guessing it’s not like a peanut allergy where you can’t be in a space with those things because He’s around fruit in the castle.
Yeah, I’m guessing he just doesn’t eat it for some kind of reason.
And I don’t know what the again the consequences would be.
And Michael also did say that Clyde apparently did not mention this to producers.
So I’m guessing it’s something not severe enough to disclose in medical information.
However, Clyde mentioned it to his fellow players, perhaps, to say, like, oh, yeah, like, you know, and I’m this is Andy me making this up as an example, but I don’t want any pineapple.
Like, I can’t eat fruit.
It’s, you know, I’m allergic to it or whatever.
So we have a situation where, for one of the first times in the Traitors’ history, We have clear, concrete evidence observed by other players of Traitors in action that is accurate.
Correct and really has completely, you know, nailed two of them.
And the other players write that off.
And vote out someone else instead.
But we didn’t see that.
We did not get that information because that was not included in the episode at all.
So, what ends up happening is we see this as completely nuts and just like it doesn’t look like it makes any sense at all.
My headline for my recap for that episode was: Traitors New Blood gave us a full episode full of WTF decisions.
And that was the big one for me is like, how do you just dismiss all this apple throwing and apple juggling and everything else?
How do you write that off so fast?
And there was an answer, and it was discussed.
At the round table, that could have been included in the episode.
I don’t know how long Michael or other people talked about Clyde’s allergy.
I don’t know if Clyde weighed in during that.
I imagine you can get that information into a minute or two of television screen time.
I don’t know why they didn’t include that.
Was it because of time?
Because we have those 20 or 30 minutes less?
Every episode to try to tell this story?
Or was it because they decided that they didn’t want this kind of production information to be included?
That has happened so much over the years on Survivor and other shows.
We hear players talking about things that went on That affected the game, but that we didn’t get to see because they were edited out because perhaps they involved something like another series of events.
Sometimes on Survivor, it’s like another, a whole ‘nother thing happened, but ultimately that didn’t matter.
So we didn’t see it, and that makes sense.
But in this case, I think not showing it to us.
Hurts the game.
It makes people watching the Traitors New Blood think that these players are idiots and don’t know what they’re doing and can’t believe the one person who’s actually figured it out.
Of course, again, like I said, we are watching from the perspective of people who know much more than the players, so we know that Victor is right.
But still, this just overwhelming sense that this is a season that isn’t working.
And I think it’s because of what we are being shown and how little of it is actually making it to our T Vs compared to previous season of the Traitors.
I’ll end on this discussion of time, I guess, by saying that season one of The Traitors US, that half civilian, half reality star season.
That had episodes ranging from 43 minutes all the way up to 59, oh, sorry, 59 minutes for regular episodes, 72 minutes for the finale.
So, one minute more than the 42-minute episodes of The Traitors New Blood for its first episode.
But basically, those episodes weren’t as long.
So, perhaps.
When they sat down and thought, can we do this for broadcast TV?
Yeah, we did it for season one.
We can definitely do it.
But it’s definitely the thing that’s hurting this season the most, more than the casting, more than the challenges. you know, all those things maybe people could have quibbles or analysis or opinions about.
But I really think that trying to turn This complex game into a much shorter and tighter version, and especially one for maybe a network audience.
And maybe they’re doing some things to kind of dumb it down to to try to draw even more people in, like showing them the Weasley Brothers.
It’s just not working.
So we’ll see how the rest of the season goes.
But I’m hopeful that if the Civilian Traitors gets a next a second season, they give it 90 minutes on NBC or just move it to Peacock and let that be the home of the Traitors.
Okay, on to recommendations, where I share things that are bringing joy and entertainment into my life.
First up, The Real Housewives of New York City, currently airing on Bravo and, of course, episodes on Peacock.
If you have access to Peacock, watch the last two episodes of The Real Housewives in New York City, the ones where they go on vacation. to a small private island that is co-owned by or time-shared by one of the cast members this season.
They are just a delight from the way the editing of that show Basically, it turns it into the white lotus with the music cues, the staff standing on the dock waving, and one of the staff members saying.
My arm is hurting from waving so much.
And then their supervisor is like, You can switch arms now, which is so bleak and so sad.
And yet, also explains exactly how these cast members.
And people of a certain status treat the people who serve them.
But it’s not all like a sort of upstairs, downstairs intrigue like that.
It is mostly just these women behaving badly in the most incredible ways.
I don’t want to spoil any of it because it’s like just uh delight, but if you gave up on Real Housewives of New York City in the last two seasons, like I did.
Tune back in, try those two episodes.
And if you get hooked, I apologize, but also you’re welcome.
Okay, next up is SNL UK and a sketch from a recent episode that I will link to in the show notes.
First, I’ll just say that some of the sketches and weekend update segments I’ve seen from SNL UK just watching them on YouTube have been pretty great.
And I say that As someone who can’t stand SNL US on NBC anymore, just find it completely insufferable and totally out of touch.
It’s political satire isn’t even satire or funny.
It’s just often copying what’s actually happening and not doing so with any kind of point.
And never mind Their casting of recent hosts, etc. etc.
So basically, I can’t stand SNL, but I’ve loved seeing these UK sketches, and we can update and this Trader’s sketch is amazing.
I will not give you the details so you can be surprised by them, but I’ll say that it makes really smart jokes. and a good point overall through those jokes about how players on the Traitors have so little information to go with that they will fall Prey to their own biases and to patterns of those instead.
And maybe they are maybe those are implicit biases.
But they are absolutely clearer in this season of the Traitors US and other seasons of the Traitors, and I loved the way this sketch illustrated that, even though the trend itself is awful.
And finally, I’m going to recommend a website that I have added to my phone home screen as an app or bookmark.
Called Ponder Club.
It’s ponderclub.co.
That’s P -O-N-D-E-R -C-L-U-B. co.
I’ll link it in the show notes.
As always, just find it in the episode description part of your app.
Basically, Ponder Club is more than a dozen games that are all entirely free to play.
You don’t need a subscription.
You don’t need to log in, nothing.
Their tagline is Thoughtful Games for Restless Minds.
And essentially, there’s a lot of games you might recognize, like Wordie, where you guess a five-letter word in several chat tries, or a mini crossword puzzle.
A word search, there’s something that’s kind of like Minesweeper and a bunch of other games like Sudoku and stuff.
Entirely free.
If you happen to be paying a major news outlet called the New York Times for its games, and maybe you don’t want to support that organization for all kinds of really good reasons—that are so many, I don’t want to go into them right now because it’ll take way too much time and I don’t want to rant that much.
Ponder Club has the games that you love and you can play them for free.
I will also say that, like, I am, you know, kind of a not great at crosswords.
I like the mini crosswords.
The mini crossword on when I used to play the New York Times version or when I play like the Apple News version often just feels pretty simple and quick and easy.
I like the quick part of it.
And I don’t mind the easy part, but sometimes it’s like almost too easy for some of the words.
This one, much more challenging for me.
Sometimes it’s the way the clues are written, sometimes it’s words I’ve just never even heard of.
So I find the mini challenging.
So if you’re somebody who maybe skips that because you like more difficult crosswords check that out on Ponder Club.
And at the very least, if you have multiple game apps, Ponder Club can just be an addition to that, and you can play for free and enjoy more word games and puzzles.
Finally today, life advice from Reality TV, this time coming to us from Survivor 51’s Kristen, who’s one of my favorite players.
In this clip, Kristin is talking about a strategy to help win over people in a new group that she’s been assigned to, and in which she is not somebody who has existing allies.
So the strategy she describes is obviously about the game, but I think it could also apply to regular life as well, and maybe a bit in a cynical way about winning over other people, but also perhaps in a way that Just makes us think about how we do things for other people and how that makes them feel.
Before we get to Kristen, thank you so much for joining me.
On this episode today.
If you like the show, please subscribe in your podcast app and tell a friend to do the same.
If you have questions, thoughts, or comments, please send them to me.
I would love to know what you think.
Our theme song that you heard at the top of the show is Cheery Monday by Kevin McLeod.
And this episode is by me, Andy Dehnart, and it’s copyright twenty twenty six by Reality Blurred LLC, which is also me.
And you can find me at realityblurred.com and AndyDehnart.com.
And now, Kristin’s advice.
[begin clip]
What I care about is how people feel and how they feel in relation to me.
Okay, straighten your legs.
So, if someone picks a piece of fruit that I have just pointed out, they feel empowered.
And people associate that somewhere in the back of their brain with me.