New series of The Traitors is really, really brutal, says Claudia Winkleman | The Traitors
With its cloak-and-dagger plots and gripping finale, The Celebrity Traitors is the biggest TV series in the UK of 2025; but presenter Claudia Winkleman said the new series of the regular version was even more brutal.
And viewers will be blown away by a new twist that producers say is set to “change the conversation” around the regular version of the hit reality game show, which returns for its fourth series on January 1, as Kate Garraway can testify.
The first season of The Celebrity Traitors brought new fans to the series when it aired in the fall. approximately 15 million viewers Watching comedian Alan Carr win.
Expectations are therefore high for the return of the regular version, with members of the public playing for prize money of up to £120,000.
The new, non-famous The Traitors are “getting tough,” according to Winkleman. He said: “It’s getting very heated. We’re getting some very juicy round tables. I love this gang because they play with all their heart… it gets really brutal.”
He said that during the celebrity sequence they tend to politely say, “‘No, no, after you’,” but “It doesn’t work that way… they play it spectacularly.”
Often in television, producers stick to a successful format. But speaking at a screening of the new series, producers of The Traitors said the success of the celebrity repeat had put “huge pressure” on the regular version. So they wanted to “change the conversation a little bit for this season” and add a new element.
Mike Cotton, creative director at Studio Lambert, said after The Celebrity Traitors: “We had parents coming to us and thanking us for reintroducing them to watching TV with their teenagers and children.
“It’s become a huge family viewing event, which we didn’t expect from a show about murder, lies and betrayal. But obviously there’s a lot of pressure in that situation, too.” [put] “We are switching to the civilian version.”
He added: “I think with celebrities, all audiences automatically knew who these people were; they knew why they were funny, they could easily relate to that. And when you come back to our version of normal, these are people you don’t really know; you have to learn to love them.”
“That’s also why we did this [the new twist] because we thought it would change the conversation,” Cotton said. Hints of what the change was were suddenly dropped. trailer of the show Featuring a red-cloaked Traitor on Christmas Day.
Since The Traitors began in 2022, Winkleman’s fascination with his terrifying missions and outfits (the fashion inspiration for this series is “very Oliver Twist”) has grown.
Cotton explained that all the coffins were made locally in the Scottish Highlands, where the show and its US counterpart were filmed, and that Ardross Castle, where the game is set, has a “bizarre death museum” that houses props from previous series, such as coffins and celebrity heads, which are then recycled.
Traitors increased interest in group psychology and Stephen Lambert, managing director of Studio Lambert, said: said in august It made him question how juries work.
Justice secretary David Lammy recently announced a plan to reduce the number of jury trials in the UK, with Cotton saying: “People say roundtables are like juries” and while it is fascinating that some players can be “so convinced that someone is a Traitor on little or no evidence”… unlike in real trial cases, believers are never presented with all the evidence to decide whether someone is guilty or innocent – instead they rely on trust and instinct.
Traitors starts on New Year’s Day at 8pm on BBC1 and iPlayer.
