Peacock has ordered three more seasons of The Traitors, the streamer announced last Wednesday, according to The Hollywood Reporter. That stacks on top of a season five renewal the show already had, and THR notes the series returns in January for that season, so there are at least four more seasons of the roundtable coming. Alan Cumming is signed on to host them, fresh off his third consecutive Emmy for outstanding host for a reality or reality competition program.
The timing is what got my attention. THR's report ran the day before NBC premiered The Traitors: New Blood, the civilian version of the format, on Thursday (Sept. 17), with next-day streaming on Peacock. Committing to three additional seasons of the celebrity original right as you launch a spin-off with ordinary contestants is a loud bet that the format works with or without famous faces. If New Blood hits, Peacock owns two versions of a hit. If it doesn't, the original keeps the lights on.
And the original has been earning its keep. Per THR, the show's most recent season won seven Emmys, the most in a single year for any competition series, covering best reality competition program, host, directing, production design, cinematography, costumes and picture editing. Peacock also says that season scored the show's biggest ratings to date, and viewership reportedly surged 72 percent over the season before. Nobody renews a show like that out of charity.
My hesitation is the casting. THR describes the setup: 23 contestants start as Faithfuls, Cumming picks typically three of them as Traitors, and the Traitors then "murder" a Faithful each night while everyone else tries to work out who they are. Studio Lambert produces, and the contestant pool comes from reality TV stars and other media personalities. That pool strikes me as the whole trick. The game is better when somebody at the table already has a reputation to defend, and a table of strangers has to build one from zero. Four-plus more seasons is a lot of familiar faces to keep finding, which is presumably part of why the civilian version exists.
So the experiment I care about is New Blood, and whether the format needs fame to function. Cumming, meanwhile, looks like the fixed point: three straight host Emmys suggests the performance wrapped around the game matters as much as the game. What I want to know next is whether New Blood pulls numbers anywhere close to the original, and whether four more seasons pushes the celebrity casting toward stunts. I honestly don't know which version I'd rather get four more of.
