At the beginning of 2025, if youâd asked me the TV show I was most looking forward to this year it would have been the Celebrity Traitors. After the resounding success of the first three series of the regular show, a celebrity version was hotly anticipated by fans. As much as I loved the regular show and was looking forward to it, though, I was honestly a little concerned about whether introducing celebrities was the right call â whether it would take away from the fun of getting to know random, ordinary contestants.
I couldnât have been more wrong. The last month of my life hasnât been so much filled with essays and assignments than my brain going âmaybe someoneâs been recruitedâ âwe must avenge the wrongful banishment of Stephen Fryâ âtwo big dogs and one small Catâ âis Mark Bonnar okay?â etc, on repeat. Itâs been a massive success for the BBC as well and once again speaks to how much better linear TV releases are to binge watching. We need more of it!
Iâm really interested in the differences between the celebrity and regular version â both were successful, but why?
A massive difference in this version of the game was the outside knowledge everyone brought in of every playerâs personas, and this undoubtedly affected the gameplay. No offence to Alan Carr, whose performance on this show was one of the most entertaining things Iâve seen all year, but I donât think it was purely down to his gameplay skills that he managed to stay under the radar and win: moreso the extremely poor performance from the faithfuls.
Despite him forgetting he had won a shield and, I cannot stress enough, literally not being able to get through the sentence âI am a faithfulâ without laughing, the others seemed to adopt a dismissive attitude because thatâs just who he is. Similar behaviour from a traitor in the regular version would surely have seen them voted off much earlier, where the players did not know each other already. It also contributed to who people were suspicious of, such as actors, but I think this again just indicates how little the faithful have to go on in the early stage of the game, leaving them clutching at straws which was only exacerbated by this previous knowledge.
And who can forget the Big Dog Theory, the oddly poetic-sounding theory coined by Joe Marler early in the show? He guessed that with Jonathan Ross and Stephen Fry being the most famous players (and, letâs face it, men) the producers would have selected them both to âleadâ a team of the faithfuls and the traitors. Once again, in a different show this just wouldnât have happened. Having said that, seeing as it still took until episode seven for Jonathan as a traitor to be caught, Iâm actually not sure whether this did affect the gameplay as much as it should have!
Now, while I obviously love the regular Traitors, I have to admit its final episodes are often its biggest weakness. They can come off as underwhelming and I finally understood why now being able to compare it to the celebrity version. With the money going to a charity whatever happened, there werenât the personal stakes of a player chasing money with the power to change their life. As a result, viewers didnât have that same awkward feeling watching them lose out on that opportunity at the last hurdle. This definitely contributed to the more comedic tone of this version, so in a weird way it was nice to finally see emotion and an acknowledgment of the toll the game takes on you even though it is just a game â unless you count Mark Bonnarâs completely justified crashouts every episode.
This to me is the biggest difference: both versions of the show obviously have the entertainment factor going for them, but the regular version is much more psychologically interesting, less guarded, and that makes sense. I donât think this necessarily makes either version âworseâ or âbetterâ than the other though. They have different strengths and play to those perfectly. The whole franchise is just a stroke of genius, and to say I will be seated for the next upcoming seasons is an understatement.