What Crime Writers Can Learn from The Traitors
The Traitors has been sweeping the UK. Three times a week, millions of people take time out of their day to watch a bunch of regular folks trying to solve an Agatha-Christie-style murder mystery. What is it that works for this series?
1) Everyone Wants To Be A Traitor
It has to do with the format, of course. At the beginning of the show, Claudia Winkleman, the host, interviews each player and asks whether they would like to be a Faithful or a Traitor. Very few want to be Faithfuls.
First, it’s kind of the reason you come into the show. Second, it’s an opportunity to be evil in a socially acceptable way. That’s why we root for the Traitors: they are regular people, playing a role and indulging in deception. And because we get to see their thoughts and strategy, we can empathise.
What we can learn: Your antagonist needs real strategic power and interesting decisions to make. Give them agency, not just evil motives. MORE: 7 Things I Learned As A Writer From Reality TV
2) The Reliably Unreliable Narrator
Claudia Winkleman is a national treasure at this point. As the host of The Traitors, she’s deliciously dark. But if we think of her role as similar to the role of the narrator, there are a few things she does well. She comes in to tell the players and the viewers what’s going to happen, but she never reveals what actually will. She increases the tension instead of easing it. And, occasionally, she breaks the fourth wall and says what we’re all thinking.
What we can learn: Your narrator can be omniscient without being explanatory. They can create the atmosphere you want the book to have at any given time.
3) The Truth is Harder than it Looks
In the fourth series, the production introduced a “Secret Traitor”. Usually, the audience knows who the traitors are, and then we get to sit on our sofas and shout at the telly, “How can you not see that she’s lying??” But when the secret traitor was introduced, we had to sit with the fact that we had no idea who it was. It’s easy to find confirmation when you know who the traitor is. It’s much harder to identify traitorous or deceptive behaviour without such knowledge. Similarly, the format shows that it’s easy to suspect innocent people based on scant evidence.
What we can learn: Consider the levels of dramatic irony you want to write into the story. What do the readers know and why? How does that differ from what the protagonist knows?
4) Likeable Villains Get Away With More
All players come in to win the game. No one is there to make friends, not really. But in this show, we see very clearly that the likeable people can get away with more. It can be either Traitors getting away with lying, or Faithfuls getting away with being consistently and confidently wrong about who is a traitor. At the end of the day, around the round table, people’s votes are influenced by how much they like the person.
What we can learn: Your characters do not have to be likeable, but the chatty neighbour can probably get away with murder more easily than the recluse creep. MORE: What Marvel Can Teach Us About Writing Powerful Villains
5) Bold Moves Work … Until They Don’t
In the fourth series, we have seen some bold moves. And I’m not saying that bold moves never work. It also depends on your message: if you want readers to leave with a lesson of “bold moves work”, that’s completely fine. But this series has shown us two ladies (so far) who took a risk, and it backfired spectacularly both times. The social consequences of being too bold, especially for women, can be dire.
What we can learn: A maverick is all good and well, but if you choose to feature a bold move, consider the social dynamics in which the character operates. MORE: What Even Feminists Get Wrong About Crime Fiction
Last Points
The Traitors works because it treats deception as socially complex rather than morally obvious. Crime writers can steal this: give your antagonists real agency, use your narrator to build atmosphere, vary what readers know and when.
Also, remember that social dynamics matter as much as evidence, and let bold moves have realistic social consequences. That’s what keeps millions of us glued to our screens three times a week.
Good luck!
BIO: Gal Podjarny was born and raised in Israel/Palestine and has made homes in Canada and the UK. In her writing, including her blog, she draws from these diverse cultural landscapes to examine how social forces shape personal choices.
Her debut novel, Until the Walls Come Down – a story about a Jewish Israeli woman who discovers her childhood home in Jaffa used to belong to her Palestinian husband’s family – is out now.
