The World Needs More Celebrity Traitors
The BBC has done a solid to the rest of the world and renewed the single greatest reality competition show currently on TV: The Celebrity Traitors U.K. The BBC confirmed it was renewing the celebrity version on November 10, just four days after the finale was broadcast on November 6. Host Claudia Winkleman will return. While the U.S. Traitors has cast celebrities for its entire run, this was the first non-Muggle season in the U.K. “In 2026 the doors of the castle will be opened again to welcome celebrity players to the game to see who can charm, who can scheme and ultimately who can survive in series two which promises to be just as unmissable as the first,” the BBC’s head of entertainment, Kalpna Patel-Knight, said in a statement. Is that a glance at everybody outside the U.K. who watched the series through TikTok clips?
Though it hasn’t debuted in the U.S. (yet!), Celebrity Traitors was a rating sensation in its home country. The season finale’s live broadcast averaged 11.1 million viewers, per the BBC. That’s 16 percent of the entire country watching the show live, which is to say nothing of the week-after streaming numbers, which have yet to roll in. Part of the appeal of the U.K.’s Celebrity Traitors was that the series cast incredibly famous, high-culture Brits to play the game — rather than reality-TV stars — and they all took the game seriously, showing new sides to themselves. Sir Stephen Fry was a stoic figure, cast against the farting, BAFTA-winning actress Celia Imrie, who adored beloved chat-show presenter (and Traitor) Jonathan Ross. Standout players included the surprise Sherlock, rugby player Joe Marler, and comedian Alan Carr, who sweat buckets from the very first moment he was made a Traitor. For U.S. viewers, this would be like watching Morgan Freeman, Meryl Streep, Ken Jennings, Rob Gronkowski, and Nikki Glaser play a reality-show version of the party game Mafia. Actually … Andy Cohen, make that happen.
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