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The Guardian

Lie, cheat, steal, repeat: will the Traitors knockoffs ever cease?

This is a punt, but Fox might have started to commission new shows via the power of online thesauruses. Take its new reality show The Snake. It's a game of secrets and betrayal, of feigning one emotion to gain trust while you stab your new friends in the back. In other words, it's basically The Traitors. I don't know whether any of you have ever searched Merriam Webster for synonyms of 'traitor', but 'snake' is literally second on the list. And this laziness is indicative of the show itself, which is such a painfully halfhearted retread of The Traitors that it ends up being exhausting to watch. Hosted by Jim Jeffries, presenting in the style of a drunk guy shouting through his letterbox at 3am, The Snake gathers contestants from the most easily stereotyped professions – detective, ex-con, pastor, Onlyfans model – and has them connive at each other until only one remains. The runtime of the first episode is almost exclusively given over to letting these people describe exactly how unpleasant they are. Subsequent episodes involve gross-out challenges, like drinking meat smoothies or being relatively close to some insects, so in that regard a direct comparison to The Traitors is slightly unfair, because it's actually ripping off The Traitors and Fear Factor in equal measure. But perhaps this isn't such a surprise, because at the moment you could wade through television blindfolded and stumble into any number of shows that desperately want to be The Traitors. Maybe you saw Netflix's Million Dollar Secret, which was a version of The Traitors set in a luxury hotel. Or Netflix's The Trust, which was a version of The Traitors hosted by someone from CNN. Or maybe you saw the USA Network's Snake in the Grass, or ITV's The Fortune Hotel. Perhaps you even accidentally found yourself watching Amazon's 007: Road to a Million, which was a version of The Traitors explicitly designed to make you feel depressed about the future of James Bond. None of these shows are shy about their inspiration. They are all about people encouraged to screw over their peers for a quick buck. But the problem is that, as a format, The Traitors is unbeatable. It is beautifully simplistic. People move into a castle. Some of them have to secretly undermine everything. Everyone goes crazy with paranoia. That's it. It's bulletproof. A monkey could understand it. But the networks can't just produce a straight remake of The Traitors, because that would be cheating. And so every new iteration has to add some new element, a gimmicky format point that differentiates it just enough to be legally distinct. With The Fortune Hotel it was a sunny location. With The Snake it's adding too many unnecessary insects. But this sort of tinkering can easily overwhelm a format. In the UK, ITV recently produced a Traitors knock-off called Genius Game that was so absurdly convoluted – every episode was full of endless tedious explanations about bags and tokens and codes and zombies and garnets – that it quickly felt like the worst kind of hungover Boxing Day board game imaginable, the kind where everyone gives up halfway through and just ends up eating Twiglets in silence. It was like watching The Traitors, but a version of The Traitors that had been loaded with so much superfluous paraphernalia that its ankles shattered under the weight. And, true, television has always done this. We've already lived through the Pop Idol phase, where civilians were alternately encouraged to either sing or cry on command. And then there was the Love Island phase, where we found ourselves inundated with an infinite number of nimrods copping off in villas. The Great British Bake Off formula has been variously transposed to sewing, pottery, dressmaking, glassblowing, flower arranging and, probably before long, bereavement counselling. Now it is the turn of The Traitors. A year or two from now another show will get its time in the test tube. That said, maybe The Traitors deserves this fleet of copyists. After all, The Traitors is not a new idea. It's based on Mafia, a game devised in the halls of Moscow State University in the 1980s. It's also incredibly similar to the board game Secret Hitler, not to mention a 2004 BBC show that was literally called Traitor and ran for five episodes in 2004. Even so, The Traitors stands as the perfect refinement of the idea; it is thrilling and accessible in equal measure. None of its copycats have even come close to replicating it. Still, the night is young, and there are still 41 perfectly unused synonyms for 'traitor' left in the thesaurus. Coming soon: The Rat (The Traitors but organised crime), The Quisling (The Traitors but wartime Scandinavia) or The Stool Pigeon (The Traitors but everyone eats cold chicken bones out of bins).