The Traitors: New Blood Has an Identity Problem: Changes Producers Need to Make

When the masterminds at NBC first announced The Traitors: New Blood, a brand-new season with regular, everyday people, we were thrilled. No endless chatter about “gamers.” No plots to kill Real Housewives. Just another chance to watch Alan Cumming say “murrrrrder” while wearing the most outrageous outfit you’ve ever seen.

And at first, they had us. The premiere was intriguing. After that? The show has slowly lost steam. With the finale right around the corner, this civilian season is starting to feel less like a hit and more like a failed experiment.

We haven’t heard news on whether they’ll do this format again. But should they give it another go, a few changes could make New Blood just as beloved as the celebrity version.

Less influencer casting, more ordinary people (and longer episodes)

The whole point of The Traitors: New Blood was to bring ordinary people into the castle for their shot at the game we’ve watched our favorite reality stars play. Instead, we got a cast largely made up of influencers. They don’t all fit into that category, but a significant chunk of the players arrived boasting hundreds of thousands of social media followers. There’s nothing ordinary or interesting about that.

Michael Foote, for example, introduced himself on the show as a lawyer, but on Instagram he calls himself “the internet’s favorite lawyer,” complete with over 200,000 followers.

Similarly, Sherry Kuehl was introduced as a writer, which may be true, but she’s also the host of the Snarky in the Suburbs podcast and has a quarter of a million Instagram followers. These aren’t average Joes, so the show lost some of its credibility before we ever saw any gameplay.

Casting wasn’t the only place producers shot themselves in the foot before leaving the gate. The other issue is episode length.

The US version of The Traitors was literally built for streaming. It’s been a Peacock original this whole time. But when they announced New Blood, they moved it to linear TV, smack in the middle of primetime, sandwiched between your local news and Season 28 of Law & Order: SVU.

To fit its new one-hour block, producers reformatted the show. Factor in those pesky commercial breaks, and these episodes land at roughly 42 minutes, compared to the hour-long escapes we fell in love with in the celebrity version. The result is episodes that feel scattered and uneventful. Without the usual rhythm of breakfast, challenge, and roundtable, watching New Blood feels like riding an escalator to nowhere.

More challenges, more shields, and fewer easy escapes

Because of the condensed runtime, New Blood has deemphasized the challenges and the perks that come with them. In the celebrity version, every moment feels high stakes. The missions give players extra opportunities to snuff out information. We don’t see nearly as much of that here, and the challenges feel like an afterthought.

They’re also where the shields come into play, protecting players from murder, creating tension when someone rushes to grab one, and causing chaos if the Traitors don’t know who got it.

So far, shields haven’t been a major factor this season. Previous iterations gave away multiple shields in a single challenge, forcing the Traitors to narrow down their options. That meant less free rein to murder people aimlessly without a storyline to justify it.

Without that pressure, the game is far too easy for the Traitors. And when that happens, it takes way too long for the Faithful to start making progress.

Enough with the overproduced twists: Let the Traitors do their job

Thanks to those formatting choices, we endured seven painful episodes of the Faithful players pointing fingers at each other. It wasn’t until Episode 7 that Victor Vollbrechthausen started piecing together the painfully obvious murder in plain sight. #Fruitgate.

Unfortunately, his enthusiasm about playing the game spooked the rest of his misguided Faithfuls, and they pushed him out during Episode 7’s roundtable. At least, it seemed that way ahead of the episode’s cliffhanger.

Fortunately for Victor, the producers saw the writing on the wall and introduced a twist: the power of the pardon. They set it up in that episode’s mission: whoever ended up with the most cash earned the power to veto Episode 7’s banishment. Conveniently, each bag contained a different amount, information never revealed to the audience.

Without any explanation of how much money was collected, we learned that Shane Beatty, an ironworker who had uttered about five words before this moment, won the pardon. Then, even though voting to banish Victor five seconds earlier, Shane decided to give him another chance. Reality TV magic!

And if that wasn’t lucky enough, the next day, Alan announced there would be no challenge. Instead, the players headed straight into another roundtable.

That extra dose of prodding paved the way for Victor to continue his case against Tomica Adams, a Traitor. Finally, after eight episodes and some very convenient producing, they banished their first Traitor. They got there, but it felt like a chore to watch it all play out.

This may only be the first season of The Traitors: New Blood in the US, but there have been dozens of versions of this show around the globe. No one at NBC needed to reinvent the wheel, yet it feels like they’re trying to.

With better casting, less production intervention, and the hour-long episodes we deserve, The Traitors can get back to its glory days. If they can’t, let’s stick to the celebrities. At least they bring the fashion.

The Traitors: New Blood airs on NBC on Thursdays at 8/7c. Episodes stream on Peacock the following day.

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