Miss The Traitors’ Normies? Book a Trip to Deal or No Deal Island.
Just a few days stand between you and another foggy jaunt back to the Scottish highlands for the latest season of The Traitors, where one of the sub-games will be determining whether Tom Sandoval is the first to be banished or if the Traitors will drag the guy into the later rounds as a human shield. (Heaven forbid he actually gets tapped to be one. Can you imagine?) But let’s say you can’t wait for a new hit of that sweet, sweet social strategy. Or maybe the winter blues have you so parched for sunlight that you want something bright to round out your reality competition diet. Might I suggest a tropical excursion to NBC’s Deal or No Deal Island, which returns for a second season tonight on good ol’ linear television?
Don’t be put off by what appears to be a Frankenstein monster mashing together Survivor-lite elements and the original Deal or No Deal’s math-and-chance cerebralism — which this show absolutely is. Believe me, I’m just as surprised as anybody that this 30 Rock–induced fever dream of a spinoff is actually good, and it’s not just because of Joe Manganiello’s enthusiastic hosting or the array of tight-fitting tropical shirts being subjected to his voluminous upper body. Despite its mishmash design, the show is fun and finely tuned, and its structure of building each episode towards a classic game of Deal or No Deal is kind of ingenious. Each round starts out with physical challenges, called Excursions, where teams compete to secure briefcases containing varying cash values that add to the prize pot. The social layer kicks in at the end of each Excursion, when a member of the team with the most accumulated value has to select who among the team with the least must play a classic game of Deal or No Deal and risk elimination, which pays off the relationships and dynamics fomenting between contestants as they hang out around their island accommodations.
Listen, there’s no getting around how the game design is totally convoluted, and yet it all improbably works. It also happens to feed my personal appetite for a competition that pits reality television veterans against newbies. I was perhaps in the minority believing that The Traitors shouldn’t have completely jettisoned normies from the American game, which robs us of the opportunity to experience great dramatic clashes between reality television demigods while mere mortals work to wedge their way into the pantheon. It’s a Greek tragedy and the Divine Comedy, all in one.
Deal or No Deal Island doesn’t quite fill the void left by The Traitors’ first American season, since its cast isn’t equally split between normies and reality vets. Rather, the show opts to sprinkle just a handful of seasoned players into the mix, rendering them a quiet subset among the dozen or so competitors. In the first season, the 13-strong contestant pool also featured Claudia Jordan, a one-season Real Housewife of Atlanta and Celebrity Apprentice player, and Boston Rob, the vaunted Survivor alum who’s now doing overtime across the NBC universe, as he’s also set to appear on the new Traitors season while serving as host for the official Deal or No Deal Island after-show. Meanwhile, the new sophomore season sees Survivor legend Parvati Shallow (who, of course, competed in last season of The Traitors), Survivor Australia all-star David Genat, and former Big Brother player Will Kirby as part of the scrum alongside newbies with names like Rock Carlson and occupations like school teacher. (“You have to learn how to manipulate in the best way possible to get what you want out of an audience. That’s what I do every day.”)
What’s curious — and enticing — about the show’s casting approach is that it doesn’t explicitly draw the normies’ attention to the demigods who walk among them. This produces some particularly fun dynamics that become immediately apparent in the second season’s opening scene: As the contestants are being shuttled to the island by speedboat and the camera cuts between the fresh-faced normies belting out their take on standard reality-television quips (“so how do you feel sitting next to a future multimillionaire?”), we eventually land on some poor midwestern soul named Luke trying his best to flirt with Shallows, she of the famed Black Widow Brigade. For those familiar with Parvati lore, it’s a great laugh-out-loud moment, and a clear sign that our boy Luke is probably not going to last very long. But unlike what was often the case in the first American season of The Traitors, the newbies here aren’t mere cannon fodder. Because they’re in the majority, they’re all vying to ascend into reality stardom themselves, and that’s how we end up with a contestant like Sydnee Peck, a chaos agent who’s clearly emphasizing playing to the camera over playing the game, being given enough room to develop into a proper character.
That the identity of the reality-television vets aren’t necessarily clear to everyone else in the cast also adds a fun extra wrinkle to the game. In the same way that, say, a hostage negotiator might conceal their professional background to manage how others may perceive them as a threat (as in the case of The Traitors’ first Australian season), the reality vet has to be tactical in revealing who they are … and how to handle their business if a normie who recognizes them brings it up. But the well-researched normie also has a tactical question of their own to grapple with: Do you let the reality vet know that you know who they are and run the risk of being a threat to their designs? Do you share that knowledge with your fellow normies? Or do you just bring it up and try to foster a durable alliance? The latter might seem like the obvious choice, but of course, the thing that separates reality-television demigods and mere mortals is knowing when to cut the rope and claim the prize for yourself. On Deal or No Deal Island, that delicious dramatic possibility is still on the table.