So, I have just come across the most bizarre review / opinion of the BBC show 'The Traitors' that you could imagine. And more. I genuinely thought it was in jest for most of the read.
From the EDP website (local news for East Anglia).
They may want you to register to read it so I'll copy the whole piece below.
by MXMC13
17 comments
The third series of the BBC’s hit series The Traitors ended recently.
You’ve probably already forgotten about it.
I certainly had, until I came across a news story about…the FOURTH series of The Traitors, which is already being planned.
And then I knew that I had to write this column.
Because I had an awful experience recently: I watched an early episode of this most recent series of The Traitors.
I was absolutely dismayed: I want to tell you why.
If you haven’t seen it, the way that The Traitors works is it pits people against each other in pursuit of cash prizes.
So far, so standard. But the way it does this is particularly vicious.
Some participants are arbitrarily secretly assigned to be ‘traitors’: their job is to ‘kill’ all the other participants before they are unmasked.
No-one among the ‘faithfuls’ who are not traitors knows who the traitors are.
Which means that most of the participants cannot ever trust anyone else on the show.
There is an exception: the traitors know who each other are. So they can co-operate among themselves.
This is a truly terrible set-up. The bad guys get to co-operate properly.
The ‘good’ guys are all on their own, out for themselves without being able to trust a single soul.
This is a profound undermining of the possibility of a functioning society.
Society depends upon mutual trust through and through.
The Traitors tries to get us to think as if we cannot trust anyone. That is how an extreme individualism would ‘work’: no-one would be able to trust anyone else.
Everyone would be trying to second-guess everyone else all the time. Everything would fall apart (or perhaps be taken over by the co-operation undertaken among organised crime: ie like the way the traitors on the show operate together).
In this sense, The Traitors literally represents every tendency wrong with our society: the boosting of selfish materialistic individualism, trust deliberately despoiled, the empire of the lie.
In The Traitors, people will go to any length to try to prove trustworthy – including lying.
One participant lied about her profession: she was a soldier, but pretended she worked in a nail bar.
Another lied about her background, pretending she was Welsh because apparently Welsh people are more trusted.
And these participants were not among the ‘traitors’, they were among the ‘faithful’.
It is a pretty stupid idea of being faithful that builds in lying about who you are.
Actually, I can be more precise: it is a betrayal of the idea of being faithful.
In The Traitors, everything is betrayed, including the very idea of trustworthiness itself.
In a particularly disgusting manoeuvre, this latest series of The Traitors even pitted two sisters against each other.
One was made a traitor. So she had to lie systematically to everyone including her own sister.
It is vile beyond belief to seek to violate the trust that makes families what they are.
This programme holds nothing sacred. It wants to get even siblings to turn selfishly against each other.
I wonder how these sisters are now. Will their blood-bond of love and trust ever be the same again?
And so I ask: Haven’t we had enough of lies?
Of vicious competition imposed artificially by programme-makers for cheap ratings? Of manufactured fake ‘reality’ that has nothing to do with the (deteriorating, but still achingly beautiful) real world around us?
The natural world, and the basis for our very shared existence, is being taken from under us in real time.
What we need now is none of what The Traitors manufactures. On the contrary… What we need is co-operation against threats which, increasingly, are threats to our very existence.
Imagine an alternative programme to The Traitors, an alternative suited to our time.
It would be based on the one redeeming feature of The Traitors: the ‘missions’ the programme-participants undertake for the common good, wherein they actively support older or disabled colleagues. It might be called ‘Up against it together’ – or maybe even ‘Real faithfuls’. Or simply, ‘Us’.
This new series would not pit people against each other as ‘reality’ shows always do.
It would be about forging community in the face of profound challenges: Think the kind of team-building exercises that some businesses do, but on a much grander scale.
It simply wouldn’t be a competition for cash, winners and losers.
It would be people seeking to collaborate deeply, to build deeper trust; not endless competitive lying.
It would be about us as we need to be. Becoming our best human team. Make it for us, BBC, please.
(Maybe right here in East Anglia. What say you, BBC East?)
Alan Partridge branching out to writing for local news websites?
By copying and pasting the whole article here you’re stealing someone’s work. Local press is dying on its arse. Yes the adverts and having to register might be tedious but the answer is not taking content and posting it for free on Reddit
A show called Traitors is not about love and co-operation. I’m shocked and appalled! Bring me my Pearls Martha, I feel a clutching coming on.
Man who doesn’t like social deduction games doesn’t understand why people enjoy show based around social deduction, more news at 9
I read the premise of the show and decided never to watch it and, even without seeing an episode, could have written that review.
I’m sick of shows that reward or encourage back-stabbing and duplicity.
Yano when you read something and your instant response is, ‘oh shut up’ 99% of ‘journalism’ these days
It’s a glammed-up game of Werewolf/Mafia. It’s not really complicated.
Love the comments:
>Mrs Whitlow
>
>I’d rather poke my eyes out than watch Strictly, Gladiators or Traitors. It’s not what the BBC should be doing.
Provide a range of early evening light entertainment options catering to a range of tastes and demographics?
It’s the EDP, they’re probably the worst newspaper in the country.
The other week they made an article about speed bumps outside a hospital – bloody speed bumps!
It’s Among Us for middle-class adults.
As an East Anglia resident I’m very familiar with the EDP, and this is absolutely the typical standard they put out both in terms of the pointless content and the terrible writing.
They are clearly struggling as a publication, their website became utterly unreadable from ads and the quality has gone down and down; they’re now putting some stuff behind a paywall, but having spent so many years degrading the quality there’s nothing left worth paying for. Most of their articles seem to come from people who struggle to even write coherent sentences, can’t construct a meaningful argument, can’t stick to the point, basically don’t know how to write at all. I can only assume they are taking free pieces from random bored pensioners as this article is typical of most of it.
Sad to see, used to be a good East Anglia institution, but honestly it just needs putting out of its misery these days.
EDP is a Newsquest title. Having worked for that company for many years, I can tell you that the quality of its ‘journalists’ amounts to a tiny number of trainees and freelance ‘writers’ who churn out this low quality drivel constantly.
It’s garbage.
Ah, the EDP. My hometown paper.
Nigh on unreadable without an adblocker!
I like how he calls out two strategies as stupid yet both reached the final…..
“Imagine an alternative programme to The Traitors… Think the kind of team-building exercises that some businesses do, but on a much grander scale.”
Well that sounds fucking terrible.
Perhaps not very casual UK but I was put off when I realised we were watching people fight over affording some IVF.
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