Although it aired at 8pm on New Year’s Day, more people watched the first episode of The Traitors series three than watched the Coronation Street Christmas special and Mrs Brown’s Boys Christmas special combined. If you’re one of the more than five million who tuned into the treacherous TV show on Wednesday, then you already know why: it’s more special than any special could ever hope to be. Since its debut in 2022, the reality show has become event television, stuffed with banishments, back-stabbings, murder and mayhem, not to mention, this year, a woman who is inexplicably pretending to be Welsh.
To me, The Traitors makes January feel survivable. What did we do before it existed, when we were ripped from the womb of Christmas and thrown into a world where it was always winter, but never Traitors? I shudder to recall. I am a 100 per cent faithful fan of the show; I’m in group chats that total 300-plus messages over the duration of a single episode and am more than prepared to cancel Friday night plans in favour of sitting on the sofa. This is why I feel qualified to claim that one aspect of The Traitors absolutely sucks: its overuse of cliffhanger endings.
Just in case you regularly make poor life decisions and thus have never watched the show, this is how it goes: 22 people enter a Scottish castle and three are chosen as the eponymous traitors who band together to murder their fellow contestants each night. The 19 remaining “faithfuls” must root out the murderers in their midst, and can vote to “banish” them at a daily roundtable. It’s psychology. It’s sociology. It’s camp.
But because of the show’s odd scheduling – it airs every Wednesday, Thursday and Friday throughout January, meaning you often have to wait an entire four (!) days for a new episode – it’s often quite frustrating. Almost every episode, the show will end with a cliffhanger about either who has been murdered or banished, which is presumably an attempt by the BBC to lure us into coming back. But the thing is: we didn’t go anywhere. We’re not going to forget to tune in again. It’s January. We have little else to live for.
To me, the cliffhanger endings bely the appeal of the show. I don’t really care who’s dead or banished – I care about the way the contestants will react to this news. I don’t want to be misled into thinking someone is a goner before they reveal in the next episode it was someone else entirely – I want to watch a full, excruciating, blow-by-blow of how people came to the wrong conclusion at the roundtable. I just feel disappointed and cheated when the episode ends without a pay-off.
Televisual cliffhangers are now largely unnecessary. In the era of streaming and bingeing, we don’t need cheap tricks to bring us back. Though I joked that four days seems a long time to wait for a new episode of The Traitors, it is of course absolutely nothing, especially compared to excruciating waits of decades gone by. In 1998, we had to wait over four months to find out what happened after Ross said “Rachel” at the altar!
Back then, there was no social media to remind us what everyone else was watching, and the second Golden Age of Television was burgeoning, so competition was fierce. But many believe that era is now over, with crap TV abounding – Netflix even tells its writers to have characters “announce what they’re doing” on screen to encourage lazy background watching, enabling viewers to follow the plot while scrolling on their phones simultaneously. The Traitors has already beaten the competition, so why can’t the show trust its viewers a little more? Why rely on outdated tropes? Why end every episode with an annoying playground taunt: “Na na na na na!”
What’s worse, cliffhangers in The Traitors have even left a gaping hole in the format – when the traitors kill at night, they choose between three potential victims and to maintain suspense, two of these three are always the last people to arrive at breakfast the next morning. Though this is switched up occasionally – with traitors arriving last at breakfast a handful of times in season two – this format could still provide clues for savvy contestants with a notepad and pen. I’d sooner hear who is to be killed at the end of the episode and watch the traitors discuss their strategy for seeming shocked the next morning than be left with both an unsatisfying cliffhanger and a head-scratching plot hole.
A good cliffhanger can leave you tingling after leaping off your seat – it can get your mind racing with theories and encourage online chatter. The occasional cliffhanger in The Traitors could be very thrilling – who can forget Diane drinking from a poisoned chalice in season two? – but I fear producers are overdoing it. I hope they prove me wrong as the series continues, otherwise I may become less and less faithful to the show.
[See also: How darts conquered Britain]
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