The Secret Traitor! The battle of the barristers! Fiona going all “j’accuse!” against co-conspirator Rachel! We’ve just about reached the halfway point of The Traitors’ fourth season, and it’s already been a vintage outing. Yet this time around, there’s just one small issue that’s blighting my viewing enjoyment ever so slightly. Here’s my confession: I simply cannot tell the vast majority of the younger male contestants apart.
Matt. Sam. Reece. Adam. James. Every single time, I tune in, hear these names being bandied about in whispered conversations about who’s displaying “traitorous behaviour” and who isn’t, then utterly fail to match them to the correct twenty or thirty-something bloke. They simply appear to me as a sort of generically nice-looking, vaguely amiable homogenous man wearing lovely knitwear.
The only guy from this particular Traitors demographic (white man with hair colour ranging from sandy blonde to mid-brown) who I can repeatedly manage to identify from this near-homogenous gang is Stephen. That’s largely because, in his role as a Traitor, he’s had about as much screen time as the Faithful boyband put together (not least thanks to his plaintive, child-of-divorce expressions during Fiona and Rachel’s slanging matches). Plus, he also has some great glasses.
I’m not the only one who’s seeing double (or triple, or quadruple?). “There’s about four generic 20-35 year old white men and I can’t tell the difference between them,” one viewer admitted on Twitter/X early in the game. Another shared similar bafflement, writing: “When half the Traitors [contestants] are 30 something year old white men and you can’t tell any of them apart.”
In the process of writing this, too, one colleague admitted that they’d initially mixed up Matt with Jack, a confession that only made me genuinely wonder: who is Jack? There’s another man wandering around the Traitors castle that I’ve somehow managed to entirely miss? Further research reminded me that he is, in fact, “the one with the earring”. And so I’ve tried to adopt a similar approach for the rest, matching each of these contestants with a defining and/or memorable characteristic.
Sam, who has the appropriately nebulous job title of “account manager”, looks a lot like Traitors Uncloaked presenter Ed Gamble. Reece, before he was murdered and dispatched to the great Traitors castle in the sky, cried a lot. Adam has started to refer to himself as a “ghost hunter”. Matt did a headstand in his pants in one of those nighttime VTs that’s shown when the Traitors are deliberating over who to kill next.
At first, I thought this strange affliction (could we call it Faithful-blindness?) would wear off after a few episodes, and familiarity would start to kick in. Yet two weeks in – and despite my useful cheat sheet of defining characteristics – it’s still a struggle.
It’s not the first time that a handful of similar-ish looking contestants have caused minor confusion. Back in season two, blonde Faithfuls Charlie and Evie had some viewers doing a double take. “The Traitors viewers are shocked to discover lookalike contestants Charlie and Evie are different people,” one headline read. “People are finding out for the first time that me and Charlie are in fact two different people and not the same blonde person,” Evie jokingly posted on Twitter/X after one fraught round table scene.
Perhaps my problem seems particularly pronounced because this season comes hot on the heels of The Celebrity Traitors; by the very nature of that show, we didn’t have to put so much brain power into recognising contestants because they were already known quantities. Perhaps this is just a severe indictment of my addled brain, which has apparently gone into some sort of January shutdown (maybe in protest at the sheer amount of reality TV I’ve forced it to consume recently).
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Or perhaps it has just panned out that all the similar-looking guys have defied the odds and remained in the castle together for a longer stretch of time than might reasonably be expected, based on the numbers? (Maybe this is the inevitable flipside to Traitors players’ propensity to vote out ethnic minority contestants early on, season after season.)
This isn’t a gripe at these particular players. I’m sure they’ll all get time to shine in the edit later on; maybe, for some of them, their big moments just haven’t arrived yet, and we all love a slow burn Traitors success story. It looks like Matt’s time in the spotlight is imminent, after he made a bold appeal for the Traitors to recruit him during last Friday’s episode.
But it’s worth remembering, too, that the show’s strength has always been its willingness to cast outside the usual reality TV mold, particularly in showcasing brilliant older players who seem to come with memorable back stories and a whole load of life experience (just look how much drama was stirred up by 62-year-old Fiona from the moment she donned that red cloak). It’s this spread of characters, rather than doubling down on one particular demographic, that sets The Traitors apart from the majority of reality fare.
Let’s hope that producers bear that in mind next time around. In the meantime, perhaps they can rush-release some kind of tie-in “Guess Who” board, complete with names and faces, that I can consult during the round tables and flip down whenever someone is chucked out.
‘The Traitors’ airs at 8pm tonight on BBC One
